


Captain Harkness

by GrumpyJenn



Series: The Other Ones [2]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Character Interpretation, Betrayal, Canonical Character Death, Child Death, Comfort Sex (Implied), Daleks - Freeform, Depression, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s03 - Children of Earth Arc, Forgiveness, Friendship, Implied Sexual Content, Implied Torture, Loneliness, POV Canon Character, Sacrifice, Temporary Character Death, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-18
Updated: 2013-03-03
Packaged: 2017-11-25 22:09:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 23,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/643468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrumpyJenn/pseuds/GrumpyJenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Warning: Even darker themes than usual, because this is Jack's POV of Children of Earth.</p></blockquote>





	1. Rose and the Doctor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SnubNosedSilhouette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnubNosedSilhouette/gifts), [Amie33](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amie33/gifts), [Kehwie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kehwie/gifts), [forgivenalwaysandcompletely](https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgivenalwaysandcompletely/gifts).



It all started with the Doctor.

 _No_ , thought the man who had called himself Jack Harkness, _it didn’t start with the Doctor._ But he didn’t actually remember most of when it did start... the Time Agency had taken care of that.

But it had started with the Doctor, or more properly, with the Doctor’s Companion. Sweet but feisty Rose, from the twenty-first. Jack was half in love with her the moment she literally fell into his arms. And more than half in love with her partner once they met. Now some would say that Jack was half in love with _everyone_ he met, regardless of sweetness or feistiness or gender or species. They were wrong.

Oh, he wanted _sex_ with most people he met, but it wasn’t like he was indiscriminate. He had _rules_ , damn it, even before he met Rose and the Doctor. Harm no-one. And that included emotional harm if he could manage it. Coercion of innocents was right out, and Rose was an innocent, whether she thought so or not. The Doctor was anything but innocent, but he was clearly centred on Rose, and to Jack that was another deal-breaker. Jack found himself wanting to please the Doctor, make the alien proud of him, and it had been years since he’d felt that about _anyone_. So he left them both alone, sexually speaking.

Jack didn’t understand monogamy, but he respected it, as he respected any sexual choice a person made. And if someone was in an exclusively monogamous relationship - or focused on starting one - with someone else, Jack would behave himself by their lights. He’d flirt of course; that was his nature, to use his good looks and for a while, his celebrity as the Face of the Boeshane peninsula. But he refused to be responsible for other people’s pain. It was especially hard in times like the twentieth century, when his more advanced pheromones could overwhelm the average resident, and they were a sexually repressed lot besides. So he played it safe, one playmate at a time, and he let them come on to him; no sense in hurting potential bed mates.

But Rose and the Doctor - half in love with them or not - Rose was both innocent and taken, and the Doctor taken, even if neither of them really saw the _taken_ part yet. Off limits, the both of them, so Jack kept it at verbal flirtation. He wasn’t sure the Doctor liked him anyway; they’d met because Jack had screwed up, brought nanogenes to Earth accidentally. He was sick about it once he’d realised it was his fault, he hated buggering up his number one rule. Jack was well aware that no matter how human he looked, the Doctor lived by a different code, and even though it had turned out okay in the end, the Doctor hadn’t seemed like the forgiving sort during the whole thing. He warmed up a bit by the end though - maybe because Jack had volunteered to get rid of the bomb, knowing he might not make it.

They’d rescued him at the last moment, so he was going with them. He’d have to wait and see what happened. And in rescuing him, Rose and the Doctor introduced him to _her_ , the Doctor’s ship.

The TARDIS was _beautiful_.

Once Jack realised she was a living being - not only a ship known as “her” as was the custom among humans - but an actual living, thinking, feeling _person_ , he was fascinated. She was beautiful, gorgeous. She had a distinct personality, and while she didn’t have speech and Jack hadn’t enough psychic ability - or the higher dimensional physics - to talk with her in _words_ , he felt that they understood one another. The TARDIS loved her Doctor, and she was indulgent about the strays - mostly human - that the Doctor took travelling with them. Including Jack, although he liked to think that she thought of him as something more than just another stray human. She let him tinker with her engines, for one thing, something she allowed no-one else but the Doctor to do. Forget _half in love_ ; Jack was utterly besotted by the Doctor’s Old Girl. And so although he wasn’t getting anywhere near enough regular sex for his taste, he was fairly content to stay in the ship and man her controls when needed. Flirting didn’t require words or even bipedal locomotion after all. And she was a flirt.

Jack did have some - _excursions -_ on the various alien planets or futuristic times he visited with the Doctor and Rose, but he spent quite a lot of time in the TARDIS, learning the lines and curves of her. He found the thrum of her console rotor soothing, and if he caught the Doctor giving him indulgent little half-grins like those of an uncle giving a favourite nephew a treat, well, what of it? As long as the Doctor didn’t disapprove, Jack would take it. Except for his vortex manipulator, it was all Jack had just now; two - no, _three_ \- good friends. That one of them was also a home and a great way to travel was beside the point.

For months Jack had loved the TARDIS, and yearned for the Doctor and Rose, and taken sex where he could get it without violating his own personal harm-no-one code. And now they were going to a time he knew, in a town he knew (although he hadn’t known there was a TARDIS petrol station there). They ended up in a cafe, and met Rose’s friend Mickey there. Jack felt for Mickey, poor kid. He _was_ a kid, for all he was five or six years older than Rose, and although he and Rose had a sweet little huggy sort of reunion, he obviously had just now realised that Rose was the monogamous sort... but not for him. And it clearly rocked the poor kid. Jack knew how he felt, and figured Mickey had it even worse; he’d known Rose for so long, and thought of her as his.

It was all so early-21st-century that it hurt Jack to watch, even though he was willing to snark back and forth with Mickey until he saw the bereft look in the guy’s eyes. So as the Doctor took the Slitheen out for a last meal, as Mickey and Rose went out for a last snog or whatever they planned, Jack volunteered to stay in the TARDIS, ostensibly to install the Slitheen Extrapolator and supervise the fuelling up. But really, if he was honest with himself, part of it was that he just wanted to be alone with the ship, away from the 21st-century _angst_ of it all.

Turned out to be a good thing though, as the Extrapolator almost took out Cardiff. Or Wales. Or _Earth_ , and might have, if Jack hadn’t been aboard when it opened the Rift wide. Then... then, oh god, everything happened very fast; the Slitheen had Rose, was choking her, and suddenly everything was very bright as a panel opened on the console.

_The heart of the TARDIS..._

And Blon - the Slitheen - let go of Rose and stared into the heart. Jack grabbed Rose and held her upright as she trembled, but neither of them looked away as Margaret-Blon whispered _thank you_ to - was it to the TARDIS herself? - and the skin suit flopped emptily to the decking. Jack let out a long breath as the TARDIS closed her console, and then he and the Doctor were dashing around shutting the Rift down until they had a moment to pause and find out what had happened.

The TARDIS had changed Margaret the Slitheen into an egg, given her a second chance at life, and Jack found himself awed by the sheer _power_ of the ship. And the compassion; she had it in spades. When Rose went haring off after Mickey, Jack spoke up. “Was it really, her, Doc? The ship? Or did you do that?”

The Doctor looked at him soberly out of cool blue eyes, and finally shook his head. “It was her,” he said in a clipped tone. “I’m not that nice.”

“If Rose had asked you to save Margaret - Blon - somehow, would you have?” Jack suddenly felt it was important to know.

The Doctor shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe. For Rose.”

 _For Rose,_ Jack thought. _The Doctor’ll do almost anything for her, but she has to ask. Even she has to ask._ He thought about asking the Doctor if he’d been wholly forgiven for the nanogenes, but the alien had gone all stony-faced again, blue eyes gone from cool to cold, and when Rose came back in Jack decided he’d save it for another time. He watched the cold leach out of the Doctor’s eyes as Rose told them Mickey wouldn’t be coming with them, watched her fight tears, and wondered afresh why Rose of all the people in the universe could warm the Doctor to compassion. Rose was sweet, forgiving - willing to give Mickey his second chance even as the TARDIS had given one to Blon Slitheen - but she was pretty much a standard human teenager.

It wasn’t until later - _much_ later - that Jack realised that the sweetness and the forgiveness were exactly what the Doctor needed. Sweetness to prove to him that the universe wasn’t an absolute hell hole, and forgiveness to prove to him that he was not himself irredeemable.

So Jack sighed, and put the thought of Rose and the Doctor as potential lovers into the back of his mind, where it wouldn’t hurt so much. And then he helped the Doctor set the console controls to Raxacoricofallapatorius.


	2. Bad Wolf

Jack wanted to _hurt_ someone.

Anyone would do, because Rose was dead. Disintegrated. Sweet Rose, just fucking _dead_ , for no reason other than a stupid game.

But Jack couldn’t hurt someone; he had to look after the Doctor, who was nearly catatonic with grief or shock or pain. Those cool blue eyes were blank, staring off into the distance as though searching for something, and Jack had to swallow hard at the pain in them. And after the both of them - and Lynda-with-a-Y - were tossed into the GameStation’s jail, Jack found it difficult to resist wringing the neck of the man who came to interrogate them. He didn’t know how much of the Doctor’s state was innate stubbornness and how much was shock, but he followed the alien’s lead and kept his mouth shut, his fists off the guy’s face. But it was through sheer willpower, because for the first time in as long as he could remember, Jack wanted to cause serious physical harm to another human being.

So when the Doctor growled, “Let’s do it,” Jack was more than willing to jump into action and hurt as many people as he could. _Harm no-one_ could go take a flying leap at this point, because Rose was dead. Oh, sure, he’d destroyed the bots, but they’d been trying to kill him, and they weren’t _people_ in any case. And he didn’t hurt anyone permanently. So he and the Doctor busted out of the little prison and worked their way to the control room of the station where there was a... a woman? He guessed she might have been once, but now she was... some sort of cyborg, or controller, running the operations of the GameStation through her mind and body.

Jack held her handlers at bay while the Doctor talked with her, and when one of them tried to keep him from going through a door, insisting it was out of bounds, he let loose some of the aggression he was holding, and snarled, “Do I look like an out-of-bounds sorta guy?” He got through the door and shut it behind him, and oh, _god_ , there she was, the TARDIS, and he felt a surge of relief at the sight of her. He dashed toward her, unlocked her door and climbed in, and went to the console.

 _Oh, god,_ Jack thought as the TARDIS sent him wordless reassurance, and he saw what the console screen showed him. He felt tears prick his eyes. _Rose... she... oh, god, she’s alive!_ He blew a kiss at the console and went to tell the Doctor. He had Lynda stand away from the others, counted down from three, and pressed a button in the control room.

Lynda disappeared in a cloud of dust and lightning.

“But you killed her,” the Doctor said, aghast, turning those wounded blue eyes on Jack.

“Oh, do you think?” Jack pushed another button, brought her back.

“What the hell was that?” she snapped, which even Jack knew was utterly unlike her.

“It's a transmat beam. Not a disintegrator, a secondary transmat system. People don't get killed in the games. They get transported across space. Doctor, Rose is still alive!” Jack was ebullient as he watched hope dawn on the Doctor’s face. But the Controller shouted some coordinates, and twitched, and disappeared. The Doctor traced the coordinates to the edge of the solar system and brought up a picture.

Of empty space.

But it wasn't empty, the Doctor said, and he brought down a shield to show... old fashioned science-fiction flying saucers? _What the hell,_ Jack thought, and then he realised. But... but it _couldn’t_ be, they were _gone_ , he knew they were gone! “That’s impossible,” Jack said. “I know those ships. They were destroyed.”

“Appears as though they've survived,” the Doctor said grimly.

“Who did? Who are they?” It was Lynda, looking scared.

“Two hundred ships. More than two thousand on board each one. That's just about half-a-million of them.” The Doctor again, eyes gone flat and cold once more.

“Half-a-million what?” asked Davitch, nervously. Jack didn’t blame him. Because Jack knew the answer, even as the Doctor said it.

“Daleks.”

\--/-- 

The Extrapolator had come in handy after all; Jack was able to rig it as a force field around the TARDIS. With her help, he thought, she didn’t spark or spit _once_ while he was working out how to do it. They materialised in the Dalek mother-ship, and rescued Rose, and Jack felt a thrill of satisfaction at blowing the top off a Dalek. Seemed like a good time to run, as far as Jack was concerned, but the Doctor... his eyes were haunted again, and a muscle jumped in his jaw, and Jack could see that he wanted - no, he _needed_ \- to find out how the Daleks had escaped the Time War.

It was decades, even centuries later before Jack could think of the events of the next twenty-two minutes with any sort of equanimity. Delta waves, and fixing the extrapolator to shield the station, and... and having to leave them. These people, the Doctor and Rose, people he loved. He knew he probably wouldn’t make it, but harming no-one - especially not innocents like Rose - meant putting a good face on it. So he kissed them goodbye.

And went into Hell.

Six people. Six, out of the hundred or so on Level Zero. Six people came with him. The others were too frightened, and Jack wished them luck, although with that loud-mouthed idiot from Rose’s game among them, he didn’t hold out much hope. Except in the Doctor. Because although the Doctor had to make the hardest decision of all - decide whether they and all the humans on Earth died as humans, or lived as Daleks - Jack had faith in the Doctor. Jack might die of it, almost certainly _would_ , but it was the right thing to do. Humanity as a whole would survive, even if these few on the station and the Earth had to die for it.

No need to burden the others with that knowledge though. _Harm no-one, harm no-one._ Jack didn’t count the Daleks as _people_ , so he’d get as many of them as he could, buy the Doctor time. He heard the others die, the few who had gone with him, heard them scream that he had lied to them because the bullets didn’t work, and he kept working with tears in his eyes. He heard Lynda, sweet Lynda, horrified that the Daleks had gone down to Floor Zero and killed them all. He made his way to Floor 499, to the Controller’s handlers, Davitch and the woman, Jack hadn’t even gotten her _name_ , and he told them they were the last line of defence.

And then _they_ were there, the Daleks. “Open fire!”

There was shooting and killing and comrades dying. The woman first, and then Davitch in avenging her. Last man standing, and run, use up all your bullets and _run_ as fast as you can, get away, please, just _get away_.

But it was too late to run.

A moment of excruciating pain, and then nothing. 

An unknown time later, Jack woke, marvelled for a moment that he was alive, and sat up. What was that, at the end of the corridor? Dust. Had the Daleks been transmatted away? Or killed, exterminated? He found that he was giggling hysterically at the word, shook his head to clear it, and went to find the Doctor. But when he skidded around the corner to the room where he’d left the Doctor, the TARDIS was already dematerialising.

_No._

_Please._

_Please don’t leave me here alone._

Jack fell into oblivion again, but this time, the searing agony was purely emotional.

_He left me here alone._

The next time Jack woke, he went looking for someone - _anyone_ \- alive. Maybe sweet little Lynda-with-a-Y had made it, or some enterprising coward from Floor Zero had hidden well enough to fool the Daleks.

He’d even take that idiot Roderick at this point. _Anyone_.

Jack wandered the Game Station for days, weeks maybe; it was hard to tell. He passed out a couple of times and it wasn’t until about a thousand years later that he realised he had probably died of starvation or thirst. And revived on a derelict space station with nothing for company but dead humans. And Dalek dust.

Because the Doctor had left him there, abandoned him.

He spent several days justifying the Doctor’s actions to himself; maybe the Doctor had thought he was dead, or was planning to come back for him, or was himself too ill or injured to wait. But deep down, he _knew_. He hadn’t been good enough, brave enough, and the Doctor had cut him loose. Oh, the alien wouldn’t have left him for dead; he knew Jack had a vortex manipulator and could get home any time he liked. But that was the difference between the Doctor - or maybe the Time Lords in general - and Jack, good old human Jack, wasn’t it? The Doctor was an alien; he thought and felt in different patterns. He didn’t care about Jack the way that Jack cared about him; he just wasn’t _capable_. He loved Rose, that much was evident, loved her enough to send her to safety, and Jack sincerely hoped that he had found her again.

After he left Jack alone.

The Doctor cared about Rose, cared about humans. But he didn’t care about _Jack_ , not really. Maybe it was a test of some kind; aliens did do these unfathomable things to humans, didn’t they? Had for centuries. Maybe if he was resourceful enough, brave enough, _good_ enough, the Doctor would let Jack travel along with him again. Jack would have to find the Doctor, have to use his VM unit. Cardiff in the early 21st century ought to do it; the TARDIS could refuel there.

And he could prove he was worth the Doctor’s time.


	3. The Slow Path

1869.

 _Damn it,_ Jack thought, _about a hundred-fifty years early. Unless he’s visited here in the meantime._

At least it was Cardiff. _I’ll have to reset the VM unit and... oh shit, it’s broken._

_And I can't go home... wherever home is._

\--/--

It was several years before he learned he didn’t stay dead. In a fight, on Ellis Island, he died and he came back. Through Torchwood Three’s torture of him to find what made him tick, them hiring him to capture a Blowfish who they subsequently killed, the fortune-teller, the Boxer Rebellion - through it all he could not die. Part of him was relieved; he stood a better chance of lasting until the Doctor came back to Cardiff this way. But part of him was... well, he understood the Doctor better now - it was terribly, terribly _lonely_ being the only one of your kind.

Through fairies - whatever they were - killing the men under his command, World War One, the Travelling Show, shutting down Torchwood India and the affair with Eleanor. Through dealing with the Trickster’s Brigade, more torture, the fling with Angelo in New York, Jack “committing suicide” to get away - all of it was just killing time until he could get to the Doctor.

Until Estelle.

They met in the Astoria Ballroom, at a dance put on for soldiers off to war. World War Two, full circle to the time when he had met the Doctor. But Jack couldn’t go to meet the Doctor, because he _hadn’t_. He was still Time Agent enough to remember that rule.

But he _could_ go to London, as long as he stayed away from the crashed Chula ambulance and Big Ben. So he went, looking for something else, a diversion.

He found Estelle. And it was love at first sight.

Estelle was the first woman - no, the first _person_ \- that Jack let himself love after the Doctor abandoned him. Oh, he’d felt _affection_ for Angelo and Eleanor and the rest of his bed mates over the last eighty or so years, but Estelle...

She was special, and Jack was head over heels in love with her. Eighty years of loneliness and despair and war and even torture no longer mattered. Because there was Estelle.

She was sweet and funny and kind, intelligent, bold and demure by turns, and beautiful. Dark hair, and eyes so dark a brown that they were almost black, and she loved Jack with all her heart. And so Jack found it easy to love her. Their courtship was a chaste one, with a tantalising awareness simmering at the back of it, and Jack would rather die - if he had been able to - than to hurt or frighten her by taking it to a sexual level.

Until the day before he had to leave. To go to war.

She was leaving the next day too, to work the Home Farms, and they decided to stay in her flat rather than go out with people they didn’t know. Estelle turned on the wireless, tuning it to dance music, and stepped into his arms.

Jack couldn’t help the single tear dropping into her hair as they danced, and she looked up at him. “What is it, Jack?”

“I...” he couldn’t stop his voice cracking. “I’ll miss you so much.”

“Show me,” she invited, dark eyes sparkling, and he caught his breath.

“I don’t want to hurt you.” Jack could hear how anguished his voice was, and knew Estelle could hear it too.

She dropped her eyes. “It would hurt far more if you... if you left without showing me how you feel.”

He put one finger under her chin and tipped her face up; he wanted to look into her eyes. “What happens,” he whispered, “if I don’t come back?”

“Then I’ll miss you.” Her voice and her eyes were steady, and she reached up to pull him down for a kiss. Their first real kiss; the others had been mere pecks on the cheek.

_Oh, god, so sweet._

“I love you, Estelle.” He had to say it, had to let her know that this wasn’t _just_ sex, that it was so much _more_ , and she nodded.

“And I love you, Jack,” she said, simply, and pulled away. She grasped his hand, tugged him toward her bedroom. “Show me.”

Jack couldn’t resist her. He let himself be pulled along until they sat, side by side, on the edge of Estelle’s bed. Her room smelt of lavender and lemon, and of _Estelle_ , and Jack closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He noted that the hand he held was trembling, and opened his eyes to look at her. “Do I frighten you, sweetheart?”

“Not you, Jack. Never you. But...” He shifted to hold both of her hands in his.

“But this...?” Jack let go of her hand to indicate the room, the bed, the two of them, and settled his hand into her hair, kissing her gently on top of the head.

“A bit, yes. I’ve never...” She trailed off as he skimmed one finger along her jaw to her lips.

“Do you want to stop?” Estelle shook her head wordlessly, but she still looked apprehensive to Jack. “You need to know, this isn’t just...” and it was his turn to trail off as she took his face between small, strong hands.

“Jack. If it was just sex, you could have seduced me months ago,” she said softly, and brushed her lips across his. “You know what you’re about; you could have done it. But you chose to wait, to wait for me to be ready.” She kissed him again, long and slow and sweet, and took a deep breath, looked him in the eye. “I’m ready. Show me.” And she opened her arms.

He loved her through the night, the last night before they went off to their separate wars, and in the morning they made a vow. A vow to be together until they died, and although Jack knew he couldn’t keep the vow until his own death, he had every intention of keeping it until hers.

\--/--

Jack came back to Cardiff in 1945, knowing full well that he couldn’t go to Estelle. He’d come to that conclusion in a foxhole, as he revived after dying. Again. He would have to let her think he’d been killed in action, because she would never be able to deal with the truth of his immortality. Angelo had known, and look how well that had turned out - torture and pain and... He would watch her though, beautiful and sweet Estelle, look after her, make sure she was okay. That was all he could really do now, look after the people he loved from afar, or move on after he’d known them for a few years, not let anyone know his secret.

Or _secrets_ , plural, because in 1965 he had to make one of those hard choices, like the Doctor had/would on the GameStation. The ones weighing the survival of a large group against the sacrifice of a smaller one. If it had been more cut-and-dried, if the 456 had been asking for those twelve orphans in exchange for the cure to an _existing_ illness, Jack might have felt easier about the sacrifice. But an exchange for the cure to an illness that didn’t exist yet, one that Jack didn’t remember hearing about, although he was from the future? He did it, though, followed his orders, and hated himself for it. What would Estelle, or Rose, or even little Lynda-with-a-Y - what would they say? Jack thought the Doctor might have approved, because it _was_ one of those decisions. Or maybe not... “just following orders” had not been a human trait the Doctor handled well.

Jack felt... hard. Not cowardly, as he had been when he met Rose and the Doctor, but hard, and old, and tired, for all that he looked like he had aged only months in the last century. Giving up Estelle, living through wars and torture, sacrificing _children,_ innocents... and reviving again and again. _Harm no-one_. He'd tried, he really had, but he couldn't... All he wanted was a normal life, and he knew it was beyond his grasp. He couldn’t tell people he was immortal; most 20th century denizens of Earth couldn’t handle it. But he couldn’t - _wouldn’t_ \- let himself fall in love again, and have to leave again, to pretend himself killed. It was too painful.

Oh, he could still have relationships. All he had to do was keep himself apart, and form friendships and have lovers from people who - if they couldn’t actually _understand_ , they could at least accept him for what he was. Easier said than done, but that meant Torchwood agents. Ten years later, Jack and his paramour had a daughter. Lucia was lovely, and their daughter Melissa took after her mother. But Lucia took his daughter away, had her immured in Witness Protection, out of fear of Jack. That was when Jack took a good hard look at himself; the year his lover took their child away from him. Was he really so frightening, even to other Torchwood people, just because he couldn’t die? Or was it something else about him, something _wrong_ about him aside from the immortality?

So Jack decided to be alone again. He had a reputation for shagging anyone who seemed the least bit willing, and some of that was true. But what the gossip-mongers didn’t understand - and what Jack himself could not put into words until many years later - was that he was on a quest to _feel_. To feel anything, really, just some sort of emotion that wasn’t despair. Oh, he _seemed_ cheerful enough; he'd always been able to put a good face on things. His colleagues at Torchwood thought he was fine, just fine. And he had moments when he thought he might be warming up to the world around him, like in the nineties when he went to the Powell Estates - several times - and watched Rose Tyler grow up. But that was from afar; he didn’t dare show himself for fear she’d remember him later, and it didn’t melt the icy core where his heart used to be. Jack kept on in this state of cold despair for decades. 

Until the 21st century, when everything changed.


	4. Everything Changes

_“Hey, when you joked about the MIllenium Bug I didn't realise it was going to have 18 legs stocked with poison. Anyone home? Hey! You know you're supposed to party like it...”_  
  
 _...but they were dead. All of them but Alex. And then Alex was dead too, by his own hand, all over me, and..._  
  
Jack woke with a start. Nightmares. Almost every time he slept now there were nightmares, memories of things that he hadn’t been able to stop. Like Alex killing the whole Torchwood Three team, including himself. Like being tortured, however many times that had occurred. Like his men being suffocated with rose petals, or hours in a foxhole with explosions over his head, or dying in a bar fight and reviving.  
  
It was just as well he didn’t need much sleep anymore.  
  
Jack stretched and got up. Stretching was something else he didn’t really need to do physically anymore either, but old habits - very old habits - died hard. He climbed through the hatch into his office in the Torchwood Three Hub and looked vaguely around. _Coffee,_ he thought, _I had some in here. Where’s the cup?_ He spotted it behind a dead plant on his desk and picked it up. Cold, naturally, but he dumped it into the plant and headed to the coffee maker. No water of course, and week-old grounds and no fresh beans. What a waste.  
  
He could pick up a fancy coffee drink somewhere; he had to get out soon anyway, go down to UNIT and start building his own Torchwood team. He’d made do with the people sent to him from Canary Wharf in London, since the day a few years before when... he shied away from the thought; it was bad enough he had to dream about it. Anyway, he needed his own team, not one made up of substitutes reporting to that Yvonne woman. She reminded him of Emily and Alice, late of Torchwood Three about a hundred years before, and as such he couldn’t find it in himself to trust her. He shuddered away from that thought as well. Emily and Alice had enjoyed getting information in ways Jack preferred not to think about. So yes, he needed people not loyal to Yvonne.  
  
So far for his own team he had Suzie Costello; she was brilliant, but he needed more people. This Toshiko Sato might be just the person; he could use a computer expert, and one loyal to him personally. Which she likely would be, if he rescued her now. It wasn’t very often that their roles were reversed this way; usually Torchwood was considered to be far more ruthless and less understanding than UNIT, but it looked like the Sato woman had really upset them.  
  
She must have, Jack realised when he saw her, because they’d beaten her up. Her build and features were so delicate that he winced inwardly at the sight, but he mustn’t let her hear it in his voice. “Who are you?” she asked, and although she clearly made an effort to sound tough, Jack could see the frightened woman inside. Toshiko Sato was brilliant, and she was absolutely terrified. He wasn’t sure whether it was simply this situation or whether it was a usual state for her, but she was close to a breaking point.  
  
And Jack wanted to get her working for him before she hit that point. “Nobody,” he said gently, and then put on one of his patented smiles. “I don’t exist. And for a man of my charisma that’s quite an achievement.” He explained her situation, questioned her about following the incorrect plans, and she answered, but she was holding herself so tightly controlled that it made Jack’s teeth ache with sympathy. Time to ease up a little. “But you, Toshiko Sato, you automatically fixed things as you went along. What I'm trying to say is, ‘Aw, baby! You're good.’.”  
  
Toshiko looked away, as though she were ashamed of her skill, and Jack wondered if it was shyness or terror; it wasn’t quite clear, so he thought he’d sweeten the deal. “Shame you’re gonna be locked up forever,” he said, casually, as though he was using reverse psychology on a toddler. But Toshiko, even as brilliant as she was, bought the line. Or appeared to; maybe she knew he was manipulating her, but if it would get her out of here she didn’t care. “So what d’you say?”  
  
“How could you trust me?” She said it quietly.  
  
“Instinct,” Jack said simply, and smiled at her.  
  
And so Toshiko came to work with him and Suzie, and they got rid of another of Yvonne’s lackeys, and eventually - it took months - Jack’s computer specialist loosened up some. Just a bit really, but to the point where she was comfortable with him and with Suzie. Even years later Tosh never seemed confident in anything but the computer work, and she was shy and retiring under the best of circumstances, but she became an irreplaceable part of Jack’s team. She seemed to view him as a father figure, and Suzie as a sort of older sister. And over the years she became as dear to Jack as a younger sibling  
  
Part of his family.

\--/--

Tosh seemed more comfortable with the team in general before Owen got there a year later. But her evident unrequited fancy for Owen was probably what made her terribly awkward and shy with Owen himself.  Jack could see the crush; Tosh practically radiated it in a combination of longing glances and heightened pheremones. But Owen was either oblivious or he didn’t care.  
  
Owen was a find, a good doctor and somewhere in there, Jack thought he was probably a decent man. Oh, he was reluctant to join; suspicion was his first reaction and who could blame him? He was a civilian, brought into the shadows of Torchwood through no fault of his own, and he didn’t want to be there. All he wanted was his Katie, the woman he loved, but she had been lost, killed by an alien parasite. Which was Owen’s first encounter with creatures not of the Earth.  
  
So Owen did his job (usually; sometimes he was too hung over and Tosh would quietly cover for him) and tried to have sex with anyone who would hold still for it. Except for Tosh, which seemed to break her heart... though she didn’t show it much; anyone who knew her less well than Jack did would only see the crush, not the heartache. Jack himself really didn’t care that Owen and Suzie were shagging almost immediately once Jack brought the young man in. But then he understood fucking just for the comfort of a warm body, and Owen had cause, poor kid. So belligerent and angry and desperately sad at the loss of his fiancée. Good medic though.

\--/--

And they needed one. Jack didn’t, of course, but he kept that secret to himself, even from his team. He trusted them as much as he trusted anyone, but they were all so _young_ , and so easily hurt, and Jack... well, Jack found that he didn’t think he could take it if they rejected him because of the immortality. Not them, not these these kids he’d let himself care about for the first time in decades.  
  
Then Jack met Ianto, and _care about_ became too mild a term.  
  
Jack didn’t want to fall for Ianto. First off, the boy was one of Yvonne’s; he’d escaped the disaster that took Canary Wharf, and as far as Jack could tell, Ianto was also straight enough to draw lines with. Twenty-first century humans and their little boxes. Until Ianto shanghaied Jack into trying to catch and tame a pteranodon, and the two men ended up panting into one another’s faces in a roll-away from the damn thing.  
  
After that, Jack was pretty sure that Ianto’s little twenty-first century box was a little more open than he’d previously thought. Maybe even more than Ianto himself was aware. He’d have to see where that led though, because Ianto was also very... buttoned up. Quiet most of the time, and reserved, in spite of all the flirting about Jack’s coat. He was hard to read, and he had been one of Yvonne’s, so Jack would take that slowly.  
  
The five of them - Jack and his team - fought Weevils and monitored the Rift and catalogued alien artifacts and got into and out of trouble. He was rid of Yvonne’s people now (unless he counted Ianto); in fact Torchwood Three was about it these days. One had been Yvonne’s debacle in London, Two was that one man in Scotland, and Four had gone missing. Jack had shut down Torchwood India himself almost a hundred years before, and if there were other branches, _he_ wasn’t aware of them. So now that Torchwood was his baby, Jack felt pretty good about what he’d done here, the changes he’d made; he thought the Doctor would approve.  
  
Then Jack met Gwen Cooper.  
  
And everything changed again.


	5. Hard Choices

Underestimating the man who called himself Jack Harkness was easy to do. He made sure of that, with quips and flirtations and supposedly off-hand remarks about things the people of this century found fantastical. He _had_ to, had to protect himself and his people, the team who made up Torchwood Three.

Even _they_ sometimes underestimated him, and they should know better by now. He could see the startlement on their faces when he looked up from the dead body in the pouring rain, raised his voice at the girl in the parking garage, and called, “What do you think?” She ran away.

But he knew she'd be back.

And she _was_. Not bad for a P.C. on the beat - after the incident with the Weevil at hospital she tracked them down and posed as a pizza delivery girl to get in. Jack joined in his team’s game, playing with her to see how she’d react, but he watched them all very carefully as they teased her, and put on the casual-banter voice again to set her at her ease. Showed her Torchwood, showed her the Weevil, was quietly amused at her reactions.

Those reactions impressed Jack. Police Constable Gwen Cooper was as mundane as they came; she’d never seen any of this before, she was terrified, but she... coped. She just coped with all the strangeness. So he took her out, up the invisible lift and out for a drink. He’d hoped to recruit her, have her become one of them, but she wouldn’t. And so he had to retcon her, though he hated doing it. He _liked_ her, dammit, a lot. She was open-minded and intelligent and beautiful and funny, and he wanted to keep her around. But he couldn’t. So he retconned her.

And she came back anyway.

The woman was brilliant. She managed to remember through the retcon, enough to come back to the Plass and the invisible lift. And there she discovered something that Jack hadn’t.

That Suzie, Jack’s second-in-command, Suzie whom he had _trusted_... she had betrayed them all. They were meant to be working for the good of the human race, Jack thought despairingly as he silently rode the invisible lift and listened to the women above. And he hadn’t _seen_ it, hadn’t realised that Suzie - his _teammate_ \- was working against them, using the Resurrection Glove and the Life Knife for her own goals. _Dammit, Suzie, why?_ It all played out. Suzie shot him, killed him, but he revived and tried to bring her _back_ , tried to pull her away from the cliff of despair and corruption. If he could get her to go with him he could retcon her, _save_ her.

But she took that choice away.

\--/--

Gwen was a good addition to his team. Jack wanted to trust her - he felt that _snap_ of immediate connection. But after Suzie... well, he hadn’t misread anyone that badly since Lucia. So he was leery of trusting anyone, and he started watching all of them very carefully, trying to see which way they’d jump. Tosh seemed more withdrawn than usual - even for her - after Suzie’s death, and Ianto was as severely buttoned up as always, just making the odd little quip that sounded dead normal until Jack thought about it and realised it was sarcastic. Nothing new there; both were predictable reactions. Owen appeared to have no reaction at all to Suzie’s death, but who knew how he really felt?

And Gwen messed up _badly_ her first day out.

Owen had been needling her of course, so maybe that _was_ his reaction to Gwen replacing Suzie. Gwen lost her temper and threw the screwdriver _at_ Owen instead of tossing it to him gently. And all hell broke loose, in the form of a sex-vampire cloud of gas that killed several randy young men before Owen contained it with alien tech he wasn’t meant to take, and they managed to bring it down.

Then Gwen kissed him, Jack, impulsively on the corner of his mouth and he had the fleeting memory of another dark-haired woman, sweet and _real_ and kind. She hadn’t meant to let the thing out. It had been an accident born of inexperience, and she would learn. He would teach her. They all would.

They were a team.

\--/--

For a team, they sure had trouble working together. _No_ , thought Jack, _that’s not it. We_ work _together just fine; it’s the rest of life where we can’t cope._ Gwen was the best at handling other people, even better than Jack. Owen, well - after the incident with the Ghost Machine, when Owen had been so shaken by what he’d seen - he seemed to settle a bit. Tosh was quiet but aside from the longing glances at Owen was okay. Ianto got even more secretive and silent, and Jack wondered regularly what was going on there, but he didn’t chase it down.

Then they found the Cyberwoman in the basement.

The Cyberwoman that Ianto had been _hiding_ in the basement. All this time, almost two years. And Jack had never known, never suspected something like _this_. It made him want to cry, to scream at Ianto, to lash out and shake the boy, make him listen, ask him what the fuck had he been _thinking_. How on Earth could Ianto have thought he could save her? He had put them all in mortal danger, the whole city or worse if the Cyberwoman got out of the Hub, how could Ianto _possibly_ have thought any of this would turn out well?

But god, the look on Ianto’s face.

So _broken_.

Jack remembered feeling the way Ianto looked. He remembered being alone, abandoned, nobody to help him, so fucking _alone_.

The Cyberwoman had to be destroyed. There was no choice; her death would save countless others’ lives. And so Jack hated himself as he sicced Myfanwy on Ianto’s lost love, agreed silently that he was worse than anything in the basement, ached with pity as Ianto threatened to shoot them all and went back in alone, despised himself as he told Ianto to finish the job or he, Jack, would do it himself, to both of them.

“You like to think you’re a hero,” Ianto had ground out, staring straight into the barrel of Jack’s gun, “But you’re the biggest monster of all.”

He was right. Jack _knew_ he was right. But he gave Ianto ten minutes. Ten minutes to finish it, or the rest of the team would come and do it themselves.

“How can you ask--” Tosh began, but Jack was too hurt, too angry, too disgusted with himself and Ianto and the whole god damned situation, to take any back talk, even from Tosh.

“I don’t need your opinion!” Jack snarled it at her, and saw the look on her face and hated himself even more.

And when the ten minutes were up, and they went into the Hub, Jack saw that it was worse than he had thought. The Cyberwoman was gone, but she had moved her brain into that of a girl, the sweet and innocent pizza delivery girl who’d fancied Ianto in a mild sort of way for months. Of course Ianto couldn’t shoot her.

So they did it for him.

\--/--

Ianto came in and did his job silently, making coffee and managing the archives. Jack saw no reason to tell him about the cameras he’d had Tosh install, and Owen was very careful not to order pizza for a few weeks. Gwen watched them all with worry and concern in those huge eyes.

And she went with him to see Estelle’s talk on the fairies.

Jack had contacted Estelle early in the century, passing himself off as his own son, knowing that she would accept that explanation. But he had to _see_ her, to know she was real, his sweet Estelle. He knew she had aged; he’d kept an eye on her for decades, looking after her. But it didn’t matter; she was Estelle, no matter how wrinkled her skin or faded her hair, and he just wanted to be near her until she died of old age.

When he took Gwen to meet her, he felt... odd. He was concerned about Estelle and the fairies, and he could feel Gwen watching him, that tickle between his shoulder blades, as he spoke with the older woman. The odd feeling was even more pronounced when they went to Estelle’s house, and Gwen picked up a photo. “This is you,” she said, and he took it and shook his head.

“Sorry,” he said, trying to sound natural and casual, “No, that’s my dad.” _Did she buy that?_ “He and Estelle were quite an item at one time,” he continued, and explained that it had been war time and they had been parted by duty.

By the end of their visit, Jack still wasn’t sure that Gwen believed him about his father and Estelle. Gwen was very perceptive, she _saw_ things, and what she didn’t see, she wasn’t shy asking about. But then she’d have to be, around here, wouldn’t she, or she’d never learn anything. But he couldn’t tell her the truth, he wasn’t sure she could handle it.

And he wasn’t at all sure _he_ could handle being rejected again.

But then Estelle called him, and he heard the fear in her voice, and he didn’t care anymore, didn’t care what any of them saw or felt or knew, because Estelle was in serious danger. Danger from the fairies, she’d thought they were so pretty and good, and _now_...

And now, _oh god_ , she was dead. Not of old age, as he had hoped for; all he had wanted for her because he couldn’t be with her now, was for her to die peacefully in her sleep. Not drowned by the fairies.

His Estelle, the only person Jack had let himself truly love.

 _Dead_.

“It wasn't your dad that was in love with her all those years ago, was it? It was you.” Gwen’s voice was very gentle.

“We once made a vow. That we'd be with each other 'til we died.” _It doesn’t matter that Gwen knows_ , he thought, bleakly. _Nothing matters now_.

But it did. It mattered that the fairies weren’t done, that they’d keep on killing until they got what they wanted. They had killed his Estelle, ransacked Gwen’s home. The fairies wanted the little girl, Jasmine, and they were willing to kill again to get her as one of their own. They would not rest until she was with them, one of them.

And so Jack made another of those hard choices.

 


	6. Forgiveness

Sometimes Jack thought the universe was testing him, using his team to see how far he could be pushed before he snapped. Like a psychological version of the games Emily and Alice had played with him back in the day. Because after everything - after Suzie’s betrayal, the mistakes made by Gwen and Ianto, Estelle’s death - after all that, the group that almost did them in completely wasn’t alien at all. It was human.

If you could call a whole village of cannibals _human_.

It had started mundanely enough, a routine investigation of missing persons. Owen was being a prat as usual, flaunting his sex life (and Gwen’s) in the face of Tosh’s crush. Jack tried to lighten the mood with silly questions about whether snogging aliens counted... and then Ianto broke it entirely.

In the weeks since they’d destroyed the Cyberwoman that had been Lisa, Ianto had slowly started to come out of the shell of despair. He had been nearly invisible for those weeks - all business, very careful to call Jack _Sir_ \- and Jack had given him space. It _hurt_ Jack to see how much Ianto despised him right now, even though he figured the boy had cause. Ianto smiled occasionally, a bitter, twisted half-smirk, and Jack knew he still had moments of loathing for them all, except maybe Tosh.

Jack _hated_ that look on Ianto’s face, hated the bitter resentment sharpening the round Welsh vowels in Ianto’s voice, so when the SUV was stolen, Jack split the team up. Ianto and Tosh to find the SUV by the GPS, and the others to investigate the village. And there he was reminded of why he kept Owen around, even though the man was an arse; he was an excellent doctor. Owen patched Gwen up after she was shot, even as he argued with Jack about the others’ safety

“They’re not children!” Jack shouted. “They know what to do!”

Even as he said it, Jack knew he was wrong. They were so _young_ in some ways; only one of his little team had even reached thirty, all of them younger than Jack had been on that day - decades ago and centuries ahead - when he had met Rose and the Doctor. But they were well-trained, and when the chips were down they were a good team, tough kids, all of them. But they were in too deep to take care of it themselves. So he battled the sick fucks of the village, rescued his team, his _family_. He let Gwen talk him out of killing the bastards outright. Took Ianto and the other kid to hospital.

Picked up the pieces.

\--/--

 _Maybe the universe really_ is _testing me,_ Jack thought. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but when even Tosh - the oldest and most level-headed of his team - brought an alien menace into the Hub, he had to wonder. The terrible things that woman had done to Toshiko, well... Jack was _fiercely_ glad he had figured out the transporter in time to send her to the middle of the sun. They had gotten rid of her fairly quickly, with no physical damage to the team. But the alien had managed to get nasty little hooks of doubt into Tosh, and the full effects her influence had had on Tosh’s always fragile self-esteem... those remained to be seen.

But _Suzie_. They had worked together so long, he and Suzie, long before he recruited any of the others. He had _trusted_ her. And her earlier betrayal hadn’t been the end of it. Not _nearly_.

It had started fairly routinely, if unsettlingly, a man killing people and indicating that it had something to do with Torchwood. They had realised they’d need to use the Gauntlet quickly, no other way to get information from the dead. Jack tried it first; it was his job as leader of the team. But it didn’t work; it never had worked well for anyone but Suzie, and Jack wasn’t sure why, except that the damn thing seemed to need something special. Compassion, maybe, so when Gwen suggested _she_ try it, well... he let her. Even though he knew the Gauntlet was sort of addictive, that they’d probably need the knife to make it work properly, even after Gwen’s initial violent reaction, he still let her revive Suzie.

 _Suzie_...  She had planned it from the beginning, set up a sleeper agent, linked herself to Gwen, stolen the other woman’s life force. She had quoted old poets, implemented secret codes, locked down the Hub with them in it, caused an innocent man to commit murder for her. She had forced Jack to kill her. _No_ , he thought, after. _She didn’t force me. I_ wanted _to kill the bitch, wanted her_ dead _for what she did to Gwen, to so many innocent people_.

But she had also forced them all to work together again. Owen and Tosh and Ianto and Jack, all working together again for the greater good. Each with their separate tasks, the medical and the esoteric and the practical and the pragmatic, but together. To save one of their own from the one gone astray.

And somewhere during the course of that horrible time, as Jack wrestled with despair and guilt and pain, sometime during all that mess...

Ianto forgave him.

\--/-- 

It wasn’t all bedroom games with Ianto, even after that. Jack tried to keep it light, casual. A part-time shag with a stopwatch fetish. But it didn’t always work out that way.

 _rose petals in their mouths, unending torture, Daleks shooting, Estelle drowned, children sacrificed to the alien 456 and to the fairies... the look on Ianto’s face and the bitter broken tone of his voice, Gwen gasping with fear and shock and pain, Owen breaking down over Katie and the girl in the ghost machine and Diane... Tosh’s bruised and battered face and the wistful expression it always wore, Rose dead and then alive and the Daleks and the Doctor and Lynda-with-a-Y...Jack shooting Suzie over and over and_ over, wanting _her dead, killing the pizza girl cyberwoman, dying along with an sad and angry man lost in time, letting a man die in a cage of enraged Weevils... Lucia taking their daughter and hiding her away... alone, always_ alone _in the end..._

Jack woke abruptly, gasping for breath. _Been crying,_ he thought, as he put shaking hands to his face.

Ianto slept on beside him, snoring lightly, in the bed Jack kept in the small room under his office.

Jack took a deep and shuddering breath. He couldn’t change it, any of it. There were things he could have done differently, but he couldn’t change them now. “I’m sorry,” he whispered into the darkness of the room. “I never meant to hurt you.”

“I know,” came Ianto’s quiet voice, startling him. “You did...” his voice broke, then strengthened. “...what had to be done.”

There was a long silence.

“I shouldn’t have tried to force you to do it though.” Jack’s voice was hoarse.

Ianto turned toward him, reached over in the dimness and took Jack’s face between his hands, kissing him gently on the lips. “I accept your apology.”

\--/-- 

There was too much history between them. Between each one of them, between all of them as a group. Too much history and pain and guilt to trust without reservation, and with Jack and Tosh stuck in the past, they...

Well.

 _How many times am I going to be in London during the Blitz?_ Jack wondered as he realised they had been transported there. This was the third time, it was ridiculous; pretty soon there would be nowhere in this era for him to avoid himself. There was enough Time Agent training still in there for him to understand that this was not a good idea, but well... it hadn’t been _his_ idea, had it? He and Tosh were here by someone else’s design.

Jack had his hands full with Tosh, memories of Estelle from that time. And _him_. The real Jack Harkness, the original, large as life and twice as gorgeous. Then Tosh had asked all about it and Jack told her what he could, but... god, what a mess. The night before the original man dies, they meet. Some sort of destiny maybe, fate? The universe was testing Jack again, or hell, fucking _laughing_ at him. He talked with the other Captain, told him to kiss his Nancy goodbye, listened to the man tell him in that pained and furious voice that he had only made it worse. Damn it. He had just wanted to give the Captain one last hurrah before the plane went down tomorrow, and _this_...

But then there were the sirens and the bombs, and he couldn’t find Tosh, he was terrified she might die here, out of her own time. His fault of course, and Jack very nearly gave in to complete despair. Until _he_ came back, he wanted to talk of his own fear and his men, and Jack barely stopped himself before he told the original that death was imminent. The younger man was a soldier. He knew without the telling.

So Jack told him something more important, maybe the most important thing there was. “Go to her. Go to your woman and.... lose yourself in her.” _As I did with Estelle_ , Jack thought. _As I wanted to with Ianto..._

“Maybe I should.” He looked embarrassed, not meeting Jack’s eyes, and Jack silently cursed the _stupidity_ of mid-twentieth century sexual customs .

“Yeah.”

“Is Toshiko your woman?” It was almost a challenge.

“No,” Jack said, unable to explain that Tosh was practically a little sister to him, that he didn’t _dare_ lose himself in the people he wanted, even if he could. “There's no-one. Go to her.”

\--/--

_a dance with a frightened soldier, a kiss_

_cracks in time leading back to Torchwood, to what Owen had unleashed_

_“Who the fuck are you anyway?”_

_“What’s the fucking_ point _of you?”_

_mistrust and rage and... was it fear?_

_fear of_ him _?_

_and mutiny_

Always before when Jack had revived after death, he had awakened gasping, as though from a nightmare. But this time, after... after... he couldn’t remember... oh... yes.

After Abaddon.

After Abaddon he woke slowly, at the brush of soft lips on his cheek.

He should... say something. He should... he... “Thank you.”

Jack still couldn’t move, his limbs felt so _heavy_ , but Gwen was there.

He managed a smile.

A little while later he had... thawed... enough to get dressed with Gwen’s help, and they made their way down to the central Hub. _Oh god,_ Jack thought, _they._.. He choked up as what Gwen had told him sank in; he’d been gone for several days this time, and his team had thought it was _permanent_ , and...

...and Toshiko was running toward him; she flung her arms around him and he caught her in a tight embrace. Ianto tried to shake his _hand_ of all things, and Jack couldn’t bear the formality, so he pulled his lover close and clung to him for a moment before kissing him hard on the lips.

But Owen... Owen just stood there, mouth working as he tried not to cry. “I’m...” he began, and Jack interrupted.

“I forgive you.”

Then Owen was sobbing in his arms, and Jack finally understood how _frightened_ the young man had been, for a very long time, and had showed it in anger and meanness and insubordination to cover up the fear.

And as they stood around him, his little family, he knew that they had forgiven him too.

 


	7. The Year That Never Was

They had forgiven him, and he had forgiven them. All was well in his little world now.

But that didn’t stop Jack Harkness from running after the TARDIS when she suddenly materialised in the Plass.

He didn’t even _think_ ; he saw the Doctor Detector go off, grabbed it and shoved it in a bag, and _ran_. He shouted the Doctor’s name and ran as fast and as hard as he could, flinging himself at the TARDIS even as she started to fade out. And then he hung on tight and rode unprotected through the Vortex, knowing he was dying, knowing he might get _lost_ in there if he fell off when he died, and not giving one shit.

Not if he could see the Doctor again.

\--/-- 

He looked different. Jack only knew it was him because of _her_ , the TARDIS. And the hands matched, and what footage they had been able to piece together from the debacle at Canary Wharf. But he looked remarkably different. Tall, skinny as a rail, wild dark hair - well, _hair_ ; the Doctor he had known hadn’t had a lot to speak of - and eyes that reminded Jack of Estelle, so dark a brown they were almost black.

His companion was _gorgeous_. Martha had the dark eyes too, huge and liquid and expressive, and she treated the Doctor with a mixture of longing that reminded him of Tosh, and an affectionate sort of exasperation. She was brilliant too - apparently close to being a doctor in her own right, for all she looked to be younger even than Owen - and she had an acid tongue when she was especially put out with the Doctor. She had recovered from the shock of seeing Jack revive after a single shriek of surprise. And she hardly blinked when Jack said, with a certain bitterness, “You abandoned me.”

Clearly Martha Jones knew the Doctor very well.

Jack adored her right away, felt that _click_ of connection as he had with Tosh and with Gwen,  the instinct to trust her, even as they ran from the - were they humans? - chasing them. And when the Doctor had accused them both of blowing off the importance of where - _when_ \- they were, Martha’s expression was as rebellious as Jack thought his own probably was. _Why does he keep needling me?_ Jack thought. _Why does he make me feel like a mere_ boy _?_ But whatever the reason, this version of the Doctor was _rude_ , at least to Jack, and it appeared he was to Martha Jones as well.

But they entered the silo, reunited their rescued human with his family, met the man who was trying to save all the humans by sending them to the world they knew as Utopia. And his cute little lab assistant. “Captain Jack Harkness,” Jack said cheerily to her, and the Doctor made his third snarky remark about Jack saying hello in the past twenty minutes, and Jack began to wonder what the hell the Time Lord’s problem was. Honestly, why should the Doctor care what Jack did or who he flirted with? The obvious answer was that he _didn’t_ ; he was just being an arse. Blowing hot and cold, either right on top of Jack - and not in a good way - or not even noticing when he shook Jack down to his toes by casually brushing off the hurt and anger Jack could hear in his own voice.

Then Jack found out _why_. And he didn’t like it, not at all. He had known the Doctor was judgmental, figured he had cause, last of the Time Lords and all that. But when Jack went into the radiation chamber as the only person who could handle it, they finally had a chance to talk.

And it _hurt_.

Jack couldn’t help it, couldn’t help what he was, and apparently Rose had been the cause. That did make it better somehow, that it had been Rose trying to help and not knowing what she had done. “Even the TARDIS acted against you, tried to shake you off,” the Doctor said, and Jack felt his heart contract with pain. _No_ , he thought desperately, _the TARDIS loves me, she_ does _, she loves me, I._.. but the Doctor just kept telling his story. Not noticing - or not caring about - the heartache he caused. And Jack - as had often been the case in the past century and more - Jack kept up the charm and the banter even in the face of despair and pain.

Then back on Earth, the Doctor flinging his hatred of Torchwood in Jack’s face when he was told what Jack was doing. Not even acknowledging that Jack had done his very best to make it better even after being abandoned and alone, to make it _more_ than an anti-Doctor organisation, doing his bit to make the Earth a safer place. Refusing to see that the Torchwood he had known - under that bitch Yvonne - was not the same thing as Torchwood Three, _Jack’s_ Torchwood.

And here Jack had thought the Doctor would finally be proud of him.

\--/--

Even centuries later, Jack hated to think of the year that followed. Or didn’t follow as the case may be; most of the people of planet Earth didn’t remember it. Bit ironic, he often thought, that in harshly judging the actions of Torchwood and Harriet Jones, the Doctor had enabled the Time Lord called the Master to take over not only the U.K., but the entire Earth. And it was saved by a combination of the Master’s own phone network - hoisting the man by his own petard - and the courage of one young woman by the name of Martha Jones.

When Martha came back to the _Valiant_ , for all he’d only known her for a few days, Jack was so _proud_ of her, as proud as he would have been of any of the little family he called his team at Torchwood Three. He felt like he knew her very well, imprisoned with her parents and sister as he had been, and although her family really had no idea how incredible she was, _he_ could see it.

In all fairness, the Doctor could see it too.

Even though he had this irrational attachment to the Master, somehow felt even after all the terrible things the other Time Lord had done to him that the Master was redeemable, the Doctor could still see that Martha Jones had saved the day. The entire planet. The whole future of the human race.

Not that it helped with his grief over the Master’s death.

Jack could understand grieving the loss of the only other one of his kind. He even understood that the Doctor had loved the Master in some way too kinky even for Jack. They weren’t human, and that made a difference. But what Jack could not understand - at least not emotionally - was the unconditional forgiveness the Doctor gave the Master in spite of everything. This was not like forgiving the hiding of the half-cybered love of your life in the Hub, or forgiving the opening of the Rift to save your Captain when you didn’t know the damage you could cause. This was complete forgiveness of someone who had done unspeakable things - _deliberately_ \- to the Doctor, the people the Doctor said he cared about, and the entire population of Earth.

And Jack - who had spent the last year being tortured at the hands of this the Master, been forced to watch the terrible things the other Time Lord had done to the Doctor and the humans on the _Valiant_ \- Jack could not understand _that_ forgiveness. It was too much, incomprehensible to Jack. He loved the Doctor, had forgiven him for his treatment of Martha and of Jack himself. But now Jack was sure he’d never understand the Doctor, no matter how much he loved and forgave. 

Still, it was hard to leave them, the Doctor and Martha. At least the TARDIS had forgiven him for being an anomaly in Time, if she ever really had blamed him for it. Jack now doubted the Doctor’s statement that she had acted against him. He suspected that the whole year had been one of those fixed points, something that _had_ to happen. The TARDIS would know, of course; she lived in something like eleven dimensions at once. But there wasn’t really a way to ask her.

Martha and the Doctor left Jack off in Cardiff, which looked just as it had the day he had joined them. Of course, since the year had never been, had been reset, it wasn’t that long afterward anyway. It _was_ hard to leave them. Some silly conversation, the Doctor disabling Jack’s wrist strap and then... then Jack suddenly knew what he had to say, to help along the timeline as it had to happen. “Used to be a poster boy, when I was a kid, living in the Boeshane Peninsula. Tiny little place. I was the first one ever to be signed up for the Time Agency. They were so proud of me. The Face of Boe, they called me. Hm. I'll see you.”

And he ran off.

\--/--

Jack looked at a newspaper and noted that it wasn’t just a few days after he had left; it had been a couple of months. He could go back now, back to his team at Torchwood, but... well, there were some things he wanted to do first. He wanted to check in on other people, see what had happened in his absence, ease back into his normal life.

So he went to see Melissa. _Alice_ , he thought, _remember to call her Alice._ He had found her a few years back, when he was newly in charge of Torchwood Three, and had watched her for months before making contact. Theirs was a touchy sort of relationship; she had clearly been told he was dangerous to know, but she allowed limited contact, passing him off as her brother, her son’s uncle.

He visited others he had known through the years, those who hadn’t died or been retconned out of remembering him. He quietly checked on those who _had_ had their memories removed, swung up to have a conference with that odd guy in Torchwood Two Scotland, had a few mindless shags with strangers. Eventually he worked up the courage to go back to Torchwood, to his kids, the people he really saw as family, hoping against hope that they would forgive him again. And he picked his moment; he needed a time when his sudden appearance would be received with - if not open arms - at least acceptance. The perfect time came up a week later, when they were cornered by a Blowfish, taunting them and ready to kill them all.

“Hey kids. Did ya miss me?”


	8. A Death in the Family

He’d known it would be awkward. And it _was_ , they’d only just forgiven each other when Jack had disappeared, of course it was. Jack had expected Owen’s snide remarks, and Tosh’s reproachful glances. Even Ianto’s sullen confusion and Gwen’s sharp tongue. He had not expected Gwen shoving him _hard_ into a wall, and he tried to make them understand that he’d had to go; he’d found his Doctor. And that he had come back for them. That had been a mistake; he’d meant it for all of them, but said it to Ianto, who wasn’t able to hide the expression of loss in his eyes. Jack would have to fix that at the first opportunity they had to be alone.

First he had to deal with the rogue Time Agent now known as John Hart.

John had been Jack’s partner - in all senses of the word - for two time-looped weeks a long time ago, and Jack had loved him in that infatuated way that the very young could. They had been partners, alike in so many ways. But looked like John was still _there_ , looking for the main chance, looking out for Number One, and the rest of the universe could go bugger itself.

Jack didn’t want to be that anymore, he’d seen it taken to its logical extreme in the Master, and he wanted John _gone_. Away from his team, his territory, his family, as soon as he could manage it. His team couldn’t handle John; and Jack wanted - _needed_ \- to keep him away from them, keep them safe. He had learned what happened when old friends/enemies from the past got hold of your companions of the present, and it wasn’t pretty. Jack shuddered at the thought of Ianto - or Gwen - in the clutches of John Hart. John wasn’t _quite_ as diabolical as the Master, but it was only through lack of power.

But he had to convince Gwen, brave Gwen who had stepped up while he was gone, that she needed to step aside now, let him handle this. But she wasn’t buying it, not even when he let the love show, told her he’d come back to her... because while he was gone she and Rhys had gotten engaged. _Don’t_ show _it,_ he told himself. _She doesn’t need to know how much you’d hoped._.. because it was unreasonable for him to have hoped at all, for anyone but Ianto. Not in this time and place, when monogamy was the norm rather than the exception.

So he kissed Gwen on the cheek and tried hard not to cry.

At least he still had Ianto. Sweet Ianto, with his quiet, sardonic flirting as they searched for the Rift opening. Once he’d realised that Jack still wanted him he’d relaxed (as much as Ianto ever did), and Jack felt the lump in his throat ease. Now they could get rid of John and still have something to come back to. And they did. After all was said and done, even after the bombshell John had dropped about Grey, all of it, they still had something to come back to.

A nice, normal date with Ianto. Jack almost wept with the _normality_ of it all. They went to dinner and the cinema, and Jack took Ianto to his flat, not really expecting more out of the evening; it had been a hard day even by Torchwood standards. But Ianto invited him in, took his coat and carefully hung it in the cupboard, and grasped his hand. He drew Jack into the tiny kitchen and shoved him gently toward a small table. Jack sat, and Ianto began fussing with the complex contraption on the table. Jack ventured, “No wonder you’re the coffee king,” and Ianto offered him a quirk of one corner of his mouth and sat down.

“Tell me what happened, sir,” he said quietly, but Jack should his head. “You need it.”

“Ianto...” It was a warning, but Ianto held Jack’s gaze until he dropped his eyes.

Then he took his own advice and lost himself in Ianto.

\--/--

The next few weeks continued the theme of _normal_ , at least for Torchwood. Alien sleeper agents, self-sacrificing soldiers shifted in time. Death and heartbreak, with little threads of joy and love wound through. Normal.

Until Gwen’s Rhys got involved, and took a bullet for her.

Owen was a busy man that day; he patched Rhys up, had to put the Meat down, put it literally out of its misery, and when he accepted comfort from Tosh of all people, Jack knew he was terribly, terribly upset. They all were, Rhys as much as any of them, and Jack began to see him in a new light; he had stepped up in the crisis. Jack still didn’t like Rhys, but he recognised now that the man had some worth. Normally Jack would have insisted that he be retconned, but Gwen was adamant, and Jack found he couldn’t force the issue.

Not with Gwen.

\--/--

Martha was coming, to help Owen figure out a series of strange deaths, and Jack was looking forward to it. He’d been uneasy since they’d lost two days, though he was fairly sure they’d retconned themselves, and Martha Jones was just the remedy he needed. Someone who knew what he had been through, who had been through the wars herself, and yet was not in _his_ charge, not one of his team. And who also was not an alien. Martha could be trusted, wholly and absolutely.

God, it was good to see her, and she seemed to feel the same. In fact she said so. And once Owen got over his indignation at the prospect of another doctor in his territory, Martha fit right in with the team, just as he had thought she would. Jack wished she would stay longer, but she was on loan from UNIT, and they couldn’t do without her forever either. Martha got on with everyone. So they sent her into the Pharm - she volunteered - when they found that the string of deaths were some sort of infestation from there, and she got accepted as a clinical trial subject. So far so good. But the arse of a doctor, Copley his name was, running the place infected her, or _infested_ her, and apparently her time with the Doctor and the TARDIS - or _something_ about her - made her able to live through the metamorphosis into the adult form of the parasite.

And it was trying to get out, to burst through her skin like some kind of monster-movie creature.

But Owen was there, managed to get it out of her as Jack distracted the director - the _murderer_ \- running the place, and they were gone, running to Toshiko, so she could shut the damned place down. Then Director Copley was there, with a gun and a mission to save the death camp he called a research facility. And Owen, stupid damn _fucking_ Owen, who had never been selfless in as long as Jack had known him... Owen had to choose _now_ to play the hero. 

 _There has to be a way to fix this,_ Jack thought, but they’d destroyed the Resurrection Glove and it had never worked well for Jack anyway. Even if they had it, he couldn’t ask Gwen to use it again. But they didn’t have it, and he didn’t know what to _do_. But he knew who to ask. So he asked. And now he knew what he had to do. He got the Glove, the mate to the one they’d destroyed, and he used it himself.

And oh, god, it _hurt_. Hurt like nothing Jack had ever felt before, not even while being tortured by the likes of the Master. Because this pain was not just of the body, it was reaching into someplace infinitely cold and dark and empty, into _nothingness_ , and trying to pull out one he hadn’t known he loved so much until that one was gone. While _something_ was pulling back. Suzie had felt something in the nothingness, she had said so, and Jack shuddered as he tried to pull Owen free.

Owen _wasn’t_ gone, he was back, and he stayed after Jack flung off the Glove. And Jack didn’t know why, he wasn’t being drained the way Gwen had, he wasn’t still connected to Owen. Was it the energy that kept bringing Jack himself back? The Bad Wolf that had been Rose, connected to Owen through the Glove, or that it was a different Glove to the other as Ianto suggested?

Owen had felt something in that nothingness, just as Suzie and Jack had. And that something made Jack very, very afraid. Because he had rescued Owen from his own folly, brought him back to the Hub, protected him from the Weevils, watched him begin to change into that... _something_.

Death.

Duroc. _Hunger_.

And faith was needed to stop it. But _how?_

Faith had worked for Martha, in the Year That Never Was. Faith in the Doctor, as Martha walked the Earth telling his story. _That_ faith had been helped along by the Archangel Network. But _faith_... a little girl named Faith, in the past. Or a little boy named Jamie in the present, with faith in Owen Harper’s ability to defeat Death.

And Owen’s faith in himself.

Finally.

\--/--

Jack sat in his office, shirtsleeves rolled up, finishing up some paperwork. He found it truly amazing that even a clandestine, high tech sort of organisation like Torchwood could generate so much bloody paper. But it gave him something to do, and it kept his mind off... well.

“Not actually your fault, you know, sir,” said Ianto softly as he walked into the room.

Jack did not look up. “Isn’t it?” He tried to say it casually, but it came out bitter.

“No. You’re indestructible, Jack, not infallible.” Jack kept his head down as though looking at the papers; he didn’t really see them. But Ianto hadn’t finished. “You’re still human, Jack, and that means you can’t always _know_.”

“I could have stepped in front of him. I could have let Copley shoot _me_.” He finally looked up at Ianto, and he knew he hadn’t been able to keep the pain and guilt off his face this time, because the younger man made a quiet sound of sympathy in the back of his throat. Then he reached for Jack’s hand and tugged him gently to his feet..

“Let me help. Please?” Ianto whispered into Jack’s ear..

“Yan, I...” He shuddered and Ianto drew him down to the sofa. “It wasn’t... with the Doctor and Martha, it wasn’t what the Master did to _me_. It was what he made me watch; I was helpless. With Copley I could... I could have _stopped_ him, Ianto. And I didn’t.” He broke off, shivering, and Ianto kissed him.

The kiss was sweet, gentle, not at all like their usual playful or roughly passionate caresses. _This_ kiss, Jack thought, was meant to comfort, to show that Ianto _cared_ , that it wasn’t only sex. In much the same way Jack had tried to show Estelle, so long ago. It had been so easy to love Estelle, and so hard to let himself love Ianto. Even as he slid into the kiss, Jack thought that he had been younger back then, less damaged by life and circumstances and his own dubious choices.

But damage or no, Jack was ready to drown in the feeling of _being loved_ , to let someone else take the initiative, here in the Hub where they were safe. So he let himself be drawn into the loving, all warm skin and wet mouths and little sighs, and found it a far better way than paperwork to forget his guilt.

At least for a little while.


	9. Everybody Dies

_“Just this once, Rose,” the Doctor had crowed in delight._

Rose had told Jack that, how the Doctor had been so happy, that just that once everyone had lived. Even Jack had lived, though he suspected Rose had shamed the Doctor into it. The Doctor would have done it, saved Jack even with the mistake he had made with the nanogenes... if Rose had asked it.

And so Jack had come to Torchwood, tried to make the Doctor proud, rebuilt Torchwood, lived (and died and lived again) through torture and heartbreak and pain. And joy and love and redemption.

Death and life.

Owen had died, and Jack had brought him back. Jack still didn’t know whether it had been the right thing to do, but he had needed Owen, they all did, and so he had done it. And it had come in very handy, when they needed an agent who didn’t show up on heat sensors. But that... that made Jack feel terribly guilty, as though that was the only reason they had brought Owen back, for that and the codes. And it _wasn’t_. And wasn’t it just the height of irony, that now that Owen couldn’t do anything physical about it, he finally noticed Toshiko.

Poor Tosh, always yearning, and never getting. Until it was too late.

Then there was Gwen’s wedding. What a mess, in typical Torchwood fashion. An alien infesting the bride, making her (heavily) pregnant. Of course, why not? Rhys took it surprisingly well actually, and Jack was fairly impressed by his reaction; they even refused Retcon, although Jack offered it to them as a sort of wedding gift. A way to forget the scariest parts of that day. But they refused, and went away on their honeymoon.

Jack never did find out what had happened between Gwen and the alien when it wore Jack’s face. He suspected it had been... intense, as intense as his own scene with Ianto that night. Or the next morning, really, after they’d done all the cleanup. Jack was struggling with his own feelings, inappropriate ones toward Gwen for this time and place, and trying to resist the fall into deeper feelings for Ianto.

Because now it was more than just sex and friendship, and those feelings terrified Jack. Their lives were not safe, not working for Torchwood, and Ianto was vulnerable in a way that Jack wasn’t. It scared Jack to fall, to let himself care more deeply. Look at what had happened to Owen; Jack couldn’t bear it if something like that happened to Ianto. But Ianto didn’t see it that way. “I’m sorry, Jack,” he said, in an almost sorrowful voice, clearly struggling not to show that he was hurt. “I know you have... feelings for Gwen, and--” He broke off as Jack kissed him, hard, trying to show him that he, Jack, did care.

Even if he never said it in so many words, if he always talked around it as he had when they had sent Tommy back to his own time, Jack _did_ care. And he tried to show it, because the last thing he wanted to do was hurt Ianto. “Yan...” he murmured against Ianto’s mouth, and Ianto just sort of melted into him, holding him tightly, and Jack forced back tears. Again, for the second or third time that day. And then he showed Ianto, very thoroughly, just how much he cared. 

Jack hadn’t expected Ianto to be so strongly affected by the Night Travellers. He’d seen Ianto get upset before of course, for all the younger man was so reserved, and that wasn’t even including the disaster with Lisa. But this - Ianto was close to tears the entire time, even his usual mild sarcasm was in abeyance, and he couldn’t seem to get over the fact that they had only managed to save _one_ of the people whose last breath the Travellers had taken. Jack tried to make him see that it was better than nothing, there was nothing else that could be done... but that wasn’t good enough; Yan spent the next little while almost as withdrawn as he had been after losing Lisa.

Ianto had recovered somewhat by the time Gwen discovered the lost ones Jack had been caring for, the ones burned and changed by Rift energy. It always seemed to be one or the other of them, Gwen or Ianto, the two of his team he loved as more than younger siblings. Now it was Gwen’s turn to be distressed by the events around her, and Ianto had helped her by giving her the GPS. Jack wanted to be angry with Ianto for it, _was_ angry for a few moments, and then he realised... Ianto had done it to help _him_ , Jack. To help him share the secret of those people from the Rift with Gwen, to help the two of them be on the same side again.

And he loved Yan for it. But he still never said so. _So young... could never understand some of the things I’ve done..._

\--/--

Jack’s fault. Oh, it had been Grey and John, but it was, ultimately, Jack’s fault. If he hadn’t let go of Grey all those years ago, maybe... but he had been a kid, he couldn’t be held responsible for that _now_ , surely.

 _Grey_ could hold him responsible though, and did. And made John bury him alive, knowing that Jack would survive. Or _re_ vive. For almost two thousand years, Jack suffocated and revived, died and lived as his tormented brother had planned. And hated himself, for letting go of Grey, for rejecting John out of hand, for the dangers he’d put his team in.

The building, wired to explode, intending to either kill or maim them all, and only Gwen oversleeping that morning had saved them. But Jack didn’t know Grey was responsible for _that_ until later. It had been terrible. Four of them, of Jack’s little team, trapped in the bombed-out wreckage of that building. Trapped and injured, and Owen not daring to move for fear his dead body would be destroyed entirely. Little delicate Toshiko with a broken arm, and Ianto... Jack shuddered to think what horrors of Canary Wharf Yan must have flashed back to while he was trapped under the rubble.

Only to find out later that it had been John’s doing, the whole bloody mess, and later still that it was Grey’s... that John was only Grey’s lackey. All because Jack - as an adolescent decades ago by normal reckoning - had let go his brother’s hand. But then, just then as they left the ruins of the building, bruised and battered but intact... at that point Jack had thought it was all John. Why wouldn’t he? Because John had said it, hadn’t he? “Everything you love, everything you treasure. Will die. I'm gonna tear your world apart, Captain Jack Harkness, piece by piece. Starting now.”

Although it _wasn’t_ now; it had started decades ago and centuries in the future and light-years away. It had started then and it ended now. With traps for all of them, explosions all over Cardiff. Then John teleported Jack away, away to the past, _far_ in the past, hoping to save himself. And failing. Bringing Jack to Grey, who embraced him and then...

Grey stabbed him. And forced John to bury him alive.

Jack spent the next two millennia choking and reviving, remembering the words Grey had thrown at him before they buried him. _“They kept us just on the verge of life,”_ Grey had said, and, _“Because you let go of my hand.”_

_“I believed you’d come...”_

_Death_

_Life_

Over and over and _over_ again, endlessly, until at last Torchwood picked up a signal from the locator ring John had flung into the grave as he filled it. It took some fast talking, and some small part of Jack marvelled that he was even coherent, but he convinced them to freeze him, not let him meet himself, and then...

...and then he woke up.

\--/--

 _“Everybody lives! I need more days like this...”_  The Doctor had said it millennia ago and millennia ahead.

 _Me too, Doc_ , Jack thought.

Because they were dead. Owen for good this time, and Toshiko... oh, _Tosh_.

Jack had been too late for Tosh and Owen. He had held Tosh as she died, but Owen... and Grey...

Everybody dies.

 _“Okay,”_ said Tosh’s image on the screen _. “So. If you're seeing this I guess it means I'm, well, dead. Hope it was impressive, Not crossing the road or an incident with a toaster. I just wanted to say, it's okay. It really is. Jack, you saved me. You showed me all the wonders of the universe and all those possibilities. And I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Thank you. And Owen. You never knew. I love you. All of you. And... I hope I did good.”_

The funeral was tiny; they always were in Torchwood. The vast majority of agents had no permanent ties. So it was just what was left of them - Jack and Ianto and Gwen - and Rhys and PC Andy. And Martha, who had been unavailable for Gwen’s wedding - was it only weeks ago? - but for Owen’s and Tosh’s funeral, she would have moved heaven and earth if she’d had to.

She brought along a chaplain from UNIT to perform the ceremony, as nobody had known what religion, if any, those they had lost had followed. Jack stood, gripping Ianto’s hand tightly, Gwen doing the same to Rhys, and outwardly they were all stoic. But the red rims that hadn’t left Yan’s eyes for days, and the tears trickling down Gwen’s and Jack’s cheeks, these would have given them away to anyone who knew them. Or even those who didn’t; the chaplain was very kind and had clearly done this sort of thing before.

Then Martha and the chaplain had gone back to London on the train, but not until there had been tearful hugs and kisses all around. Even PC Andy got kissed, and if Jack hadn’t been so utterly miserable he would have laughed at the expression on the poor boy’s face.

“Jack,” began Gwen as he hugged her and Rhys together, and he pulled back to look from her face to her husband’s and back again. “Jack, d’you think Owen did know? That Tosh loved him, I mean?”

 _She looks so hopeful,_ Jack thought, and he said, “I think he did in the past few weeks. And they were together at the end.” Rhys smiled at him, and Jack knew it had been the right thing to say, that he had eased Gwen’s grief a little.

He wished someone could ease his.

“Jack.” He turned to look at Ianto, standing there in his usual reserved pose, only his eyes revealing the pain he was in. He held out one hand, and Jack took it. “Come on,” Ianto said, and tugged gently until they sat together on a bench. “You know,” Ianto said, as gently as he had drawn Jack to the bench, “You know that it isn’t your fault, Tosh and Owen.” Jack shook his head, but Ianto wasn’t done. “You saved the rest of us, Jack... me and Gwen and even John. There was nothing else that could be done.”

And then they went home to Ianto’s flat, and eased their grief together.


	10. EX-TER-MIN-ATE

“Ianto! There’s a time and a place!”

Jack hadn’t meant to bark at Ianto, but the kid was laughing at something said by some damn comic on the telly while the Earth was... dragged off somewhere. Of course Jack immediately felt guilty for snapping, because he was well aware that he himself had a fine disregard for time and place with his own coping mechanisms. But Ianto didn’t seem offended, so Jack let it go. There was enough to do anyway, and as long as Ianto and Gwen were physically okay, he hadn’t the leisure to worry about their feelings right now.

Because the Earth _had_ been dragged off some place.

But whomever had done the dragging had created an artificial shell to hold in air and heat, which suggested that they didn’t want humankind _dead_ , just... displaced. The small part of Jack that wasn’t tapping urgently at computer keys was thrilled, because this was the sort of thing that brought the Doctor. And then Martha rang, from UNIT in New York, and she had been thinking the same thing; they needed the Doctor for this. Weevils, random things from the Rift, baddies from Jack’s own past; those his team could handle, even if they died trying. But the whole Earth being sent somewhere else?

For that they needed the Doctor.

Especially when they heard the message from the ships converging on the Earth.

 

**EX-TER-MIN-ATE. EX-TER-MIN-ATE. EX-TER-MIN-ATE. **EX-TER-MIN-ATE.****

 

 _Oh god, no. **No**. _ Jack’s mind began babbling in sheer panic. _Not here, not now, we can’t, **I** can’t, I.._. It didn’t even occur to him that he was still invulnerable, unkillable. They had done it before, they could do it again. And even as he held Gwen and Ianto close, kissed them both on the head, his mind kept going in circles. _No, no, **no** , we’ll all die, we can’t, I... _“No. Oh no. There’s nothing I can do. I’m sorry, we’re dead,” Jack said bleakly, and in that moment, he absolutely believed he could die, for the first time in centuries he believed it... because they were _Daleks_.

Even Martha’s presence on the phone wasn’t enough to remind Jack that things had been worse. Panic overrode everything else in his mind, and his only coherent thought was _be strong for Gwen and Ianto_. Then the _Valiant_ went down, and Jack remembered Martha as he heard her UNIT team dying all around her, and her C.O. ordered her to use it, use the Project Indigo teleporter. _But it’s not done, it’s not **safe**_ , Jack thought wildly, and he shouted at her not to use it, but the Daleks were coming for her... and she did.

“What’s Project Indigo?” asked Ianto in a tense voice, and Jack told him.

Jack couldn’t take anymore just then, and he slumped against a wall a little bit away from the others. _Martha’s dead, the Doctor’s unreachable, the Daleks._.. everything circled back to the Daleks in his mind. He didn’t notice when Ianto crouched beside him, didn’t even see through the tears in his eyes until the younger man touched his shoulder gently. “You okay?”

Jack shook his head. “I’m sorry.” His voice was hoarse.

“For what?” Ianto’s was gentle.

“I told you. There’s nothing I can do. We’re all dead.”

Ianto cradled Jack’s face in both hands, kissed him, and murmured against his mouth, “Not yet we’re not.”

Then Ianto stood up and went away, back to monitor what was going on from a console in the Hub proper. And Jack didn’t watch him go. Barely looked up as the planet surrendered. 

“Someone’s trying to get in touch,” Gwen said, and Jack roused himself enough from his depression and terror and grief to look up.

“The whole world’s crying out,” he said dully. “Just leave it.”

“Captain Jack Harkness, shame on you!” a voice said from one of the computers in the central Hub. “Now stand to attention. sir!”

Jack jumped to his feet, responding automatically to the command that snapped him out of despondency. Harriet Jones? _Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister?_ He knew who she was, and while he hadn’t always liked her actions, he was sure glad to see her now. If any living human had the big brass ones to deal with Daleks, it was Harriet Jones, for all she looked like your basic middle-class, middle-aged woman.

The screen showed her, and then another middle-aged woman, pretty, with a young kid, and... the other quadrant of the screen fuzzed out, PM Jones boosted the signal, and the picture steadied. _Oh my god,_ he thought, _it’s a fucking miracle_. “Ha, ha! Martha Jones!” Jack heard the crow of delight come from his own throat. _She’s not dead, Martha’s not dead._ Some part of him realised that his mind was going in circles again, but at least this time it wasn’t spiraling downward in despair, and this... _this_ he could work with.

Sarah Jane Smith wasn’t hard to look at either, and when that thought flitted through his mind, Jack started to feel better, even as he flirted automatically. Oh, he was still scared, but the panic was gone, the logic returned, and he remembered now that he couldn’t be killed, not permanently. And he would do his _damndest_ to protect everyone else. He wrenched his attention back to the conversation, chatter about something called the Osterhagen Key and Martha’s Doctor-calling phone, and then he had it.

The phones had been the key the last time he had been with Martha and the Doctor, and they could be again. They didn’t have the Archangel Network to work with this time, but... “Wait a minute. We boost the signal. That's it! We transmit that telephone number through Torchwood itself using all the power of the Rift.”

“And we've got Mr. Smith,” said the boy with Sarah Jane. “He can link up with every telephone exchange on the Earth. He can get the whole world to call the same number all at the same time. Billions of phones calling out, all at once.”

 _Well,_ thought Jack, _that’s impressive. What is he, about fourteen?_ “Brilliant. Who's the kid?”

“That's my son,” said Sarah Jane with pardonable pride, and Jack smiled at her.

“Excuse me,” came an apologetic voice next to his ear. “Sorry, sorry. Hello. Ianto Jones. Um, if we start transmitting, then the Subwave Network is going to become visible, I mean... to the Daleks.”

“Yes,” said Harriet Jones in a remarkably calm tone. “And they'll trace it back to me. But my life doesn't matter. Not if it saves the Earth.”

 _God, I was right about the big brass ones on that woman,_ thought Jack, and he saluted her without a trace of irony. “Ma'am.”

She thanked him, and they each did their parts of the network - _this is more like it,_ Jack thought with a certain glee, even through minor explosions all through the Hub - and then...

 

**EX-TER-MIN-ATE**

...the Daleks were at Harriet’s door, and she transferred control to Jack, and calmly turned to face her doom. Jack spared a moment for admiration as her section of the screen fuzzed out; then he turned to the task at hand. He funneled the signal through the Rift, coordinating with Sarah Jane and her mysterious Mr Smith, and then...

Then the Doctor popped into the screen where Harriet had been. “Where the hell have you been?” Jack shouted before he thought, and then everyone started talking very fast. Ianto and Gwen discussing the Doctor behind him, and the Doctor himself being his usual motormouth (and admonishing the ginger woman beside him to just _don’t_ where Jack was concerned), and Martha and Francine and Sarah Jane babbling about Daleks but then... _then_ there was another voice, and although Jack could still hear the Doctor and Sarah Jane, and the ginger woman - Donna, he thought she was called - speaking softly to the Doctor, that _other_ voice...

The other voice was cold and high, and sounded as though it was being filtered through some sort of vox scrambler, and although what it said made no sense to Jack, it clearly terrified both Sarah Jane and the Doctor. There was more chatter, mostly villainous monologuing and the Doctor’s responses, and Jack heard the TARDIS whiz away from wherever she was. And he knew he’d better get moving, because the Daleks’ voices came back.

 

**EX-TER-MIN-ATE TORCH-WOOD**

_Oh_ hell _no. Not_ my _Torchwood_. Jack could feel that unreasoning terror creeping back, but he pushed it to one side; he didn’t have time to melt down now. He called Martha back, got the numbers from the Indigo device, fed them into his vortex manipulator. Got his coat from Ianto, his gun from Gwen, and stopped for a moment as he saw their faces. Gwen smiling a little, understanding what he needed to do. But Ianto... Yan had his stoic face on, the one that as much as shouted _I will not try to stop you but please,_ please _come back to me_. So Jack promised, and Ianto swallowed hard but accepted it, and they told him they’d be fine.

And Jack left, teleported out, appeared again...

...on a dark street in London. He took in what was going on very quickly. The ginger woman and - was that _Rose?_ \- running toward the... oh _no_ , the fallen body of the Doctor... and the Dalek.

Jack shot the Dalek, blew it up, and it felt _good_. He couldn’t allow the Doctor to regenerate in the street though, so he didn’t dwell on it, just ran to the Doctor and the women, and herded them all back into the TARDIS. The girls were hovering over the Doctor, and Jack knew they’d be hurt, even killed, if they stayed while he regenerated. So he shouted at them to get back, get _away_ , and protesting, they did.

He held both women, much as he had held Rose in this very console room with Margaret-Blon the Slitheen, or Ianto and Gwen in the Hub as he kissed them when the Daleks came.

They watched as the Doctor’s limbs and head began to glow. The glow got brighter and brighter, and the noise got louder, and eventually the Doctor was too bright to look at and then... and then the light faded, and the Doctor...

...The Doctor hadn’t changed at all.

“You see?” the Doctor asked rhetorically. “Used the regeneration energy to heal myself, but as soon as that was done I didn't need to change. I didn't want to. Why would I? Look at me! So to stop the energy from going all the way, I siphoned off the rest into a handy biometric receptacle. Namely, my hand. My hand there. My handy spare hand. Remember? Christmas Day. Sycorax. Lost my hand in a sword fight. That's my hand. What do you think?”

“You’re... still you.” It was Rose, and she walked slowly toward him.

“I’m still me,” The Doctor said, and smiled.


	11. The Biggest Family on Earth

The technobabble had been enough for Rose, and Jack could accept it, if not understand it all. But Donna, though apparently the centre of this whole thing, seemed... distracted, Jack thought. As though she wasn’t actually _there_ with them, but Jack didn’t know her well enough to know if that was normal, and it wasn’t like the Doctor collected only people like Jack or Martha. This Donna might actually be like this as a matter of course, so Jack put her out of his mind; they had bigger fish to fry.

Like Daleks.

And then Jack and Rose and the Doctor were facing them, but Donna had stayed in the TARDIS and the Daleks were burning her and the TARDIS alive in the Crucible. The Doctor was frantic, all of them shouting at the Daleks, and then the TARDIS was... just _gone_ , and Jack felt his heart sink. The last time the TARDIS and her Doctor had been separated, they’d ended up with the Year That Never Was, the Master and his... Jack shuddered inwardly but channeled the fear and the anger, pulled his gun and shot at the nearest Dalek.

Nothing happened. And then...

 

            **EX-TER-MIN-ATE**

 

Jack was down, and he felt himself die.

He woke up - _oh,_ he thought, _I woke up_. Part of him hadn’t been sure he would, ever since he had first heard the Daleks from the Hub, even though he knew better (and a smaller part of him despaired - again - that he would _ever_ be able to die). He managed to stop himself from gasping; it might be useful to have the Daleks still think he was dead. The Doctor glanced at him and he winked, then closed his eyes again and waited for his chance. Now he was sure everything would be all right; he hadn’t stayed dead in spite of the Daleks. Eventually.

After making some more threats, the Daleks tried to incinerate him (ha! like that could keep him down for long!), they all left the room, and Jack got quietly to his feet and made for a louvered vent. _Not even screwed in_ , he thought. _What kind of spaceship just has these vents sitting loose where any enterprising human could get in? Too bad for them._ He crawled in, pulled the louvers to, and reviewed what he knew of spaceship design.

It seemed like miles and miles of air ducts, and Jack began to wonder if there even _was_ a Vault, when the life signs monitor he had liberated started beeping, and he heard tense voices. He recognised two of them, and spared a moment to cheer inwardly. They were still alive! He popped open the vent and crawled out. “Just my luck,” he said, grinning. “I climb through two miles of ventilation shafts chasing life signs on this thing and who do I find? Mickey Mouse!”

 **“** You can talk, Captain Cheesecake,” returned Mickey cheekily, and they hugged each other tight _. Well, isn’t this interesting?_ thought Jack fleetingly as he flirted, but Mickey pulled away. Pity, that.

Sarah Jane Smith was even more impressive in person, and she reminded Jack of Estelle. That quiet but feisty courage, the ability to be coyly attractive and all business at once, the dark hair (though her eyes were lighter) and... but she was showing them a... was that a _Warp Star_? He hadn’t seen one of those in person _ever_ , though there was that museum on... but he needed to focus. Jack thought fast. He could wire the Warp Star up, and then maybe he could use it to hold Davros and the Daleks hostage...

...so Jack got to work. And when he was done, he made a call.

“Cap’n Jack Harkness, calling all Dalek boys and girls. Are you receiving me?” Fine, yeah,he was hamming it up, Jack admitted to himself. So what? What had he got to lose, with his little family in danger in the Hub and his own life not at risk? He explained what the Warp Star would do, where he had gotten it, and then Sarah Jane showed what she was made of. Jack could feel her trembling with fear beside him even as she defied Davros. Such a brave little thing.

But Davros was talking, berating the Doctor for how he used people, turned them into weapons, and Jack wanted to cry at the look on the Doctor’s face. _In a way_ , he thought, _Davros is right_. He sighed. _About both of us really, although I’m more likely than the Doctor to..._ although Jack would likely never comprehend how the Doctor had felt about the Master, he did understand the Doctor better now. It was those hard choices again, that sacrificing a few to save many. Jack hated it, and the Doctor’s tormented dark eyes - so _sad_ , what had happened to him in the time since Jack had last seen him? - said that he did too. But they could both see the necessity. Sometimes it was the only thing that could be done.

Then they were all teleported into the same room as the Doctor and the Daleks. They all stood, helpless, as Davros laughed with maniacal glee and activated the reality bomb, and then... the TARDIS was there. _She’s alive!_ And that meant Donna was alive, but it wasn’t Donna exiting the TARDIS, it was the _Doctor_ , the Doctor in a blue suit this time, and he was running toward them with a gun. The original Doctor shouted at him to stop, and Davros knocked him back and confined him and then Donna _was_ there. Trying to do the same as the Doctor in blue, and getting hit with the same lightning that had hit him, ending up slumped against some machinery and...

And she stopped the reality bomb, just as the countdown got to _one_. Because she was a... she was a time lord? Or part one anyway, she explained. _Yes!_ thought Jack wildly, _this is more like it!_ “The Doctor Donna,” the original Doctor breathed, and Jack and the others helped the three of them disable the Daleks and it was _glorious_!

The _hand_... it had been the hand, the one Jack had retrieved and used as a Doctor detector. It had made the blue-suited Doctor, and made Donna into part time lord, and.... “So there’s three of you,” Rose said. “Three Doctors.”

“I can’t tell you what I’m thinking right now,” Jack said, and he meant it. _None_ of these people could possibly cope with the lascivious thoughts running through Jack’s head at the thought of three Doctors. _Three Doctors,_ he thought, _two thin and male, one curvy redheaded woman, and me, I... wait. There’s a time and a place. Damnit.._. He shook his head to clear the images, and tried to keep his mind off the idea... at least until they were all safe.

And then the prophecy, the one the crazy Dalek had made, the clone made it come true. He slaughtered the Daleks, and though Jack could see that it angered the original, he couldn’t help but agree with the clone. It was the right thing to do, so the Daleks would not destroy all life in the universe. Then they were being hustled back onto the TARDIS, all of them, and the original Doctor went back for Davros. He wouldn’t come, Jack gathered, but there wasn’t time to think about that now. Because as Sarah Jane said, Earth was still stuck in the wrong part of space. “I’m on it!” The Doctor crowed, fiddling with console controls. “Torchwood Hub, this is the Doctor. Are you receiving me?”

“Loud and clear,” came Gwen’s welcome voice. “Is Jack there?”

“Can’t get rid of him,” The Doctor said, and Jack was surprised at the tone. This was cheeky teasing, not the unthinking cruelty he’d shown Jack at the start of the Year That Never Was. Either the Doctor had been through hell and back since, or the Year itself had taught him some important lessons. “Jack, what’s her name?”

“Gwen Cooper,” Jack said with barely suppressed glee, and the Doctor hooked the TARDIS up to the Hub with help from Sarah Jane’s son and Mr. Smith and their robot _dog_. And they towed the Earth home.

Even centuries later, Jack couldn’t quite explain how amazing it was to be part of flying the TARDIS properly. To be _trusted_ by the Doctor and the TARDIS to help. Six plus pilots, and she herself was clearly enjoying it, and even Rose’s mum - who had been gently pushed aside - was having fun. It was - to quote the first Doctor Jack had known - _fantastic_!

They dropped off Sarah Jane in Ealing, and then it was Jack’s and Martha’s turn. Jack teared up as he said goodbye, but they were the _good_ kind of tears, especially with the Doctor - whose eyes were still infinitely sad - and with Rose, who had somehow managed to become a badass and still retain that _innocence_. And the TARDIS; he would miss her, maybe most of all. The Doctor disabled Jack’s vortex manipulator again, and Jack found he didn’t really mind. After all, if it was truly important, he could always get a base code from Martha. He started walking, holding Martha’s hand and explaining that what with the Osterhagen thing, he wasn’t sure UNIT was such a great place to work anymore, when Mickey caught up with them. “Oh,” Jack said. “Thought I got rid of you.”

But he was teasing, and Mickey knew it (and when had _that_ happened? The Mickey Jack had known had been callow and whingey... when had Mickey _grown up_?). But this new Mickey slung an arm around each of them, and the three walked away.

\--/--

When Jack got back to the Hub, Gwen rushed him, flung her arms around him and held him tight, but Ianto...

Ianto just stood there, looking at Jack as though he couldn’t quite believe Jack had come back, lower lip trembling and clearly fighting tears. _But I saw them on the screen when we hooked the TARDIS up to tow Earth back,_ thought Jack; _he was fine then._.. Jack gently disentangled himself from Gwen, kissed her on top of the head and turned to Ianto. He held out his arms, and Yan stumbled toward him, grabbing him and clinging with both hands fisted in Jack’s coat, kissing him with a desperate sort of intensity. And then Ianto buried his face in Jack’s neck, and cried.

 _What happened?_ Jack mouthed over Ianto’s head, and Gwen shook her head, huge eyes compassionate and worried. So Jack just held on, patting Ianto’s back and murmuring into his ear. “It’s okay, I’m here, I told you I’d come back, Ianto, I’m here. I’m right here, you’re safe now...” Gwen gestured upward; she’d go home to Rhys, leave the two of them alone to work through this. Jack nodded over Ianto’s bent head and she left.

“Hey,” he said gently as Ianto’s sobs began to subside. “You okay?” Ianto sniffled and nodded, and looked everywhere but at Jack, so he took the younger man’s chin between his fingers and tilted his face up, forcing Ianto to look at him. _So scared,_ Jack thought, and he kissed Ianto almost chastely on the lips. “Come on,” he said, and led Yan into his office and down the hatch into his bedroom. 

Afterward, they lay entwined, and Ianto spoke softly into the darkness. “I was afraid.”

“I know. Want to tell me why?” Jack felt Ianto shake his head, but he answered in a whisper, as though he was afraid to say it aloud.

“D-daleks. I was scared... but okay while it happened. But after... I remembered the last time.” _Oh crap_ , Jack thought, _there were Daleks at Canary Wharf. Poor kid..._ and he tried to lighten the mood.

“You did better than me; I lost it while we were still in crisis.” But Ianto wouldn’t be jollied out of it.

“Would you go back... with the Doctor?” Ianto shivered, and Jack smiled.

 _We’ve had this talk before_ , _when Tommy had to go back to his own time_. He knew what Yan was asking. “To help, like I did today. Yeah. But not for good. Not to travel with him again.” He shifted to kiss Ianto on the forehead. “Not unless there was nothing here for me anymore. And right now... there is.”

Ianto reached for him then. And they lost themselves in each other.

 


	12. The Sacrifice of Children

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Even darker themes than usual, because this is Jack's POV of Children of Earth.

Ianto was usually so self-possessed - meltdowns over Daleks or Cyberwomen notwithstanding - that Jack sometimes forgot how very young he was. Oh, granted, everyone but the Doctor was young compared to Jack, even if you didn’t count the two millennia he’d spent buried alive. But Yan - he was only twenty-five, and he’d been through a lifetime of heartache in the three years since he had joined Torchwood. _Death by Torchwood_ , as they’d said about Suzie, it applied to all of them. Ianto had dealt with that - Canary Wharf and Lisa and Owen and Tosh - and that didn’t even include whatever had happened to him before he had arrived at Torchwood. _That_ he didn’t talk about.

Jack often wondered why. Surely Ianto couldn’t have seen - or done - the sort of terrible things Jack had. Not in only twenty-two years, before Torchwood, not here on Earth. But he couldn’t exactly ask, not and expect an answer, Not when he kept all those secrets - so _many_ secrets - himself. As long as Ianto wasn't keeping more Cybers in the basement, well... Jack couldn’t ask.

Every time Jack spoke sharply to Ianto, he felt like he had kicked a defenceless puppy. They were lovers and playmates and friends and colleagues, and still Jack couldn’t quite say the words. Not like he had with Estelle, back when he was only a hundred or so. Ianto was so young, barely out of adolescence, and Jack... well, Jack was terrified he would hurt Ianto. More than he already had. So he contented himself with loving Yan physically, and talking around the words, and he hoped that was enough. Because he didn’t feel comfortable sharing some of the darker things he’d done, unless the younger man had witnessed them... or woke Jack from a nightmare. Then he couldn’t help it.

So when Ianto was so surprised at that young doctor treating them as a couple, Jack was a bit hurt. Why make such a big deal of it - whether or not they were a couple - was Ianto fishing for validation? They _were_ a couple, weren’t they, and wasn’t that enough? Ianto agreed that they were, but that it was new to him, and Jack was mollified. But still... Better not to focus on that while they were dealing with whatever had killed this man, their purported neighbor. An alien hitchhiker, and the man was dead and it was their job to stop it.

“You’re gonna get us killed,” Ianto said teasingly as they entered the Hub after that, and Jack replied in kind.

“No. You get killed, not me. You die like a dog, like an ugly dog.”

If Jack had known what the next few days were going to bring, he would never have joked with Ianto like that.

If Jack had known what the next few days were going to bring, he would never have succumbed to the terrorist demands of the 456 back in 1965.

If Jack had known... there were a lot of things Jack would not have done.

 _Harm no-one._ He’d managed to fuck that up good and proper.

Decades, centuries, _millennia_ later, Jack chose only to remember the parts of those five days he _could_ not forget. The rest of it faded into greyness, but a few things shone out brightly, always.

For eons.

Looking up as Ianto went up the invisible lift and promising he’d come back, just before he exploded and blew up the Hub.

Reviving before his skin was fully regenerated, the _pain_ , god, the pain. Being sealed in concrete and reliving the millennia he’d spent buried alive. Suffocate, revive, suffocate, revive, over and over and _over_ again. Until at last he was released by the only people he could count on, Ianto and Gwen, his little family. Even Rhys was there.

Frobisher telling him that they’d taken Alice and Steven. If he hadn’t tried to find her back early in the decade, maybe the rest of this fiasco would never have...

The look on Gwen’s face when Clement told her it had been Jack who had given up the children in 1965. The _children_. He’d given them up, given in to terrorist threats, done what he was told, _followed fucking orders_. And now the 456 had them cornered, and his family hated him, and he loathed himself. _You see, Yan?_ he had thought bitterly, _this is why I don’t share some of the things I’ve done, you can’t cope, nobody could. Nobody with any fucking decency left in him._

Ianto. God, _Ianto_.

“I love you,” Ianto had said, as they lay dying. Jack hating himself, knowing he would revive.

As Yan would not.

“Don't,” Jack had pleaded, as Ianto closed his eyes. “Ianto, stay with me. Stay with me. Please! Stay with me, please, _please_...”

The pale blue eyes opened, but they were unfocussed. “Hey. It was good, yeah?”

 _Be strong for him, keep him talking, and maybe..._ “Yeah.”

“Don't forget me,” Ianto said in a sudden moment of clarity, and Jack’s heart seized in his chest. _No. Please, no..._

His mouth worked as he tried to say it. Goddamnit, he couldn’t say the _words_. “Never could.”

“A thousand years time? You won't remember me.” _Oh god, Yan, please no..._

“Yes I will. I promise. I will. Ianto. Don’t go. Please, _please_ don’t go...” _I will remember you. I_ will _, my Ianto, I will. Forever..._

And he did. For thousands, millions, _billions_ of years.

\--/-- 

_no... Ianto, no, please, please_

_flashes of the quick, sardonic grin_  

_“I really like that coat!”_

_cheating at naked hide-and-seek_  

_the pain, Ianto’s face, so lost..._

_“I wouldn’t change that for the world...”_  

 _Ianto..._  

And Jack woke up.

In a room full of the dead, and Gwen weeping over Ianto’s body.

 _Ianto’s body._ He was dead, and it was Jack’s fault, and Jack would avenge him on the only creatures he could. Because killing the person at fault was useless. _He_ would just revive.

It didn’t even occur to Jack to look for the Doctor, to call for help. He had done this, put the whole human race at risk - _again_ \- by ‘just following orders’. And the Doctor would hate him too.

Not nearly as much as he hated himself.

The only other living people he trusted were already here with him - Gwen and Rhys - and who would have thought he’d trust _Rhys_? - but he had to protect them from the worst of this. With Gwen pregnant and all, he... right. Anyway. He could have called on Martha, but she was off world on her honeymoon. With Mickey Smith of all people, and that had been fast work for both of them. But they would despise him too, and why shouldn’t they?

He was despicable.

Even more so once he figured out what he had to do.

He had to give the 456 a portion of what they wanted. Had to give them a child, filter the control signal through a child, to destroy the 456 here on Earth, and if the universe was willing, everywhere else too. He had to sacrifice - to _kill_ \- a child.

There was only one child available to him.

Lucia had been right. Jack was a danger to children.

Turned people into weapons, just like the Doctor.

But literally. And _children_.

And so the man who called himself Jack Harkness made the hardest choice of all. Harder than letting Estelle think he was his own son, harder than leaving a child to the fairies. Harder than anything he had done to the Doctor or Rose or Grey or John or Tosh or Owen or... or Ianto.

He sacrificed his own grandson to the race known as the Four Five Six.

\--/--

Jack needed to get off planet. Getting out of the U.K. and travelling the Earth hadn’t been enough. Too many memories here, after a century and a half of conscious time. And there was a freighter out near the edge of the System, and he had a working VM unit now, so... “Yes, I can,” he said to Gwen when she tearfully told him he couldn’t just run away. “Just watch me.”

He could. He had to.

There was nothing left for him here. Not even Gwen and her baby were enough. Not now.

So Jack left the Earth, teleported onto that freighter, walked his way numbly through adventures that would have made him gleeful just a few years back. He lost track of how long he’d been out in the dark, alone with his anger and his self-hatred and his guilt. How often he died and revived. How many times he yearned for death. Trying to atone for his sins by saving other people, other civilisations, without getting too involved. Because when he got too involved he began to like playing God.

It didn’t help.

Or maybe it did, just a little, because after a while, Jack found himself able to take an interest in the things around him at least. He was still angry and grieving and ashamed, but every so often now, something struck him as funny or interesting or even attractive. He usually descended back into that spiral of guilt, but things interested him more frequently until at last he found himself in a seedy bar on a backwater planet that was nonetheless full of varied alien life forms. A baby Adipose, a Judoon officer, some fish people he’d never seen before but Martha had told him about, a Raxacoricofallapatorian... Jack sat at the bar, nursing a drink and depression, and watched the things around him. But the bartender was talking to him.

“From the man over there,” the humanoid barkeep said, and gestured, sliding a folded piece of paper across the bar. Jack stared.

It was the Doctor.

He looked even grimmer, sadder than he had the last time Jack had seen him, those dark eyes so full of pain that Jack could hardly bear to look. _Maybe he’s come to cut me loose once and for all_ , Jack thought dully. _For ‘just following orders’._. _. because I’ve finally done something unforgivable, even to the man who could forgive the Master_. The Doctor nodded across the room at the note Jack held in his hand, and he slowly unfolded it.

 _His name is Alonso_ , the note read, and Jack looked up, confused. The Doctor raised his eyebrows and nodded again, this time in the direction of a young man coming up to the bar near Jack. _But... does this mean he doesn’t_ know _what I’ve done?_ Thought Jack, but he knew the Doctor would have known. Of course he did, and he had come to help Jack anyway, to bring him back into the world. A little message from the Doctor - or maybe the TARDIS - that it was time to pull himself out of his grief and anger and guilt.

The Doctor threw him that cheeky little salute he used instead of a proper one - he'd never liked the proper ones - and Jack straightened and saluted in return, then turned to the young man now seated beside him.

“So, Alonso,” he said. “Goin' my way?”

The young man looked at him suspiciously. “How do you know my name?”

“I'm kind of psychic,” Jack said, flirting now, but feeling rusty, out of practice. The kid - _Alonso_ \- didn’t seem to notice the lack of finesse.

“Really?” Alonso said, looking interested, and Jack couldn’t tell for sure if it was because of the flirting or the supposed psychic ability. But then the younger man said, “Know what I'm thinking right now?” in such a _knowing_ tone that Jack felt heat pool low in his belly for the first time in... well, in a while.

“ _Oh_ yeah,” said Jack, and smiled. 


	13. The Face

The Face of Boe blinked tiredly as he floated in his tank.

He did everything - even thinking - tiredly these days, thirty years after the Doctor and Rose had freed the people used as lab rats in the hospital in New New York. He remembered the day when he had first met the Doctor as the Face. Even then he hadn't been as tired as he was now...

~~~~~~

The Face wasn’t quite sure when - or how - it had happened, mutating into the Face of Boe. It was before the year 5.5/Apple/26, though, because that was when he had seen the Doctor and Rose again.

Perhaps it had been the lightning farms of that moon he couldn’t remember the name of now. Maybe it was during the time he had spent on Eden; reviving several times in the acid-filled stomach of a man-eating plant had to have some weird side effects. But he didn’t know, and it didn’t matter now.

Because now he would meet the Doctor. The ninth Doctor, the first one he had met, eons ago in the Blitz on Earth. So many stories they’d shared, so many adventures...

He had ensured that he would meet the Doctor by hosting the End of the World viewing on Platform One. He was calmer than he had been now, as the Face, and he watched with quiet amusement as Rose - _so young_ \- as Rose got offended and told off the Last Human. In the old days he would have cheered her on, or put a fist through the ‘bitchy trampoline’. Trust Rose to come up with that.

But the Last Human had sabotaged his party, as he had been told she would. Or had. As she must, to preserve the timeline. (Who had told him? He didn’t remember, but it must have been someone from later, from... he put that stray thought carefully aside.) But all he had wanted was to watch Rose and the Doctor. So young, both of them, the Doctor with those wounded blue eyes, and Rose looking so... unsure of her role as the Doctor’s companion. This was early days for them, though, he reflected, and his attention wandered as he remembered sweet and feisty Rose as she had been when they met.

Fine, then. He would watch the Doctor - Rose had disappeared somewhere while he was pondering - and see what happened. He was fairly sure they wouldn’t die, because he met them after this by their timeline, and that should mean they were safe now. He thought so; immortality did not bring with it the kind of instinctive time sense that the Time Lords had.

And so he floated in his tank, and watched events unfold. Sympathised silently with Jabe’s family as the Doctor gave them the news of her death. This Doctor had been... kinder in some ways than the one following him. To those who had lost. No patience whatever for those who made mistakes. The Face laughed inwardly as the Doctor brought Cassandra back to dry out, a desiccated husk. He watched with affection as Rose asked the Doctor to help Cassandra, and saw Rose grow up and lose just a bit of that innocence as the Doctor refused.

He loved them.

He wished he could tell them.

He couldn’t, not now, not as the Face of Boe.

It had been different when he had been Jack; then he couldn’t say the words because of guilt or anger or fear. Now it was out of his hands.

If he had still had hands. He chuckled softly to himself and telepathically arranged to be shipped across space to New Earth. He had an appointment to meet the Doctor - the tenth one this time - and Rose again. It would only be about twenty-three years.

\--/--

Almost exactly twenty-three years. And it was happening at last; he was dying. Dying of old age, as it should be, no matter how many times he had wished for death back when he was Jack Harkness. Captain Jack Harkness. So young, even at two hundred years, old for a human. Poor Jack. 

 

“But I keep wondering,” Young Jack had said. “What about aging? Because I can't die but I keep getting older. The odd little gray hair, you know. What happens if I live for a million years?”

The Doctor hadn’t known.

But the Face knew now what happens when a near-immortal ages, not for a million years, but for billions.

Novice Hame, the little cat nurse who cared for him most often, looked up at him and smiled in her feline way. He liked Novice Hame.

Most of the time, when the Face thought of Jack at all, it was as though he was looking at a film, a film with the scents and touches and tastes as well as the sounds and sights. He could remember being Jack, remember all that came with Jack, all the baggage and the grief and the anger. But it was a step removed, as though Jack Harkness’ life had been a favourite childhood story.

And now he was so old, so close to death at last. It was probably only a few decades off. His mind was beginning to wander. Moments of absolute clarity, when he thought of the lost loves and lost lives of his family, his friends. But often his mind was in as much of a fog as his body, floating, insulated in its little tank. He laughed inwardly because he was doing it even as he thought about it; letting his mind wander.

Sometimes it wandered in directions he’d prefer it didn’t.

~~~~~~

The Face didn't like thinking - or maybe had managed at last to forget - about his time as the man they called the Miracle. It had all been pain and torture and politics and mindless shags with people Jack hadn’t liked very much. Punishing himself for Steven and Ianto and Grey and the rest. Not like the bulk of his time as Jack Harkness, which had been a mixture of love and hate, pain and joy, his time with Torchwood through the years, before Miracle Day.

Times with the Doctor, when he felt he understood the alien early on, and when he didn’t with the Master and with Davros.

The times when he understood the Doctor again, how one could _need_ someone sweet and innocent after making the hard choices. Jack had needed Alonso after sacrificing Steven, in the same way the Doctor had needed Rose after the Time War. After sacrificing his own for the good of his world; the Doctor’s world was just bigger than Jack’s had been, that was all. Otherwise they had been the same, tired and angry and needing proof that the universe wasn’t all a pile of shit. Rose had provided that proof for the Doctor, and the Doctor had understood that Alonso could do that for the man who had been Jack Harkness. Maybe better than he knew.

The Face remembered...

~~~~~~

“You miss him,” came Alonso’s soft voice from the dimness, and Jack started. He had thought the younger man was asleep. He had to swallow hard several times before he could speak.

“Who?”

“Whomever I remind you of,” Alonso said simply. “You started to say his name, before you caught yourself and said mine. You miss him.”

Jack sighed. _Shit_ , he thought, _he’d never tell me if that hurt him._ “Yeah. I do.” His voice broke on the last word.

“Want to tell me?” Alonso’s voice was quiet, and steady, but when Jack glanced over he could see tears - of sympathy? - in the blue eyes. Eyes so like Ianto’s.

“Not much to tell.” Jack shrugged, trying for a casual tone and knowing he failed miserably. “I loved him and I never told him.” He took a deep breath. “And now he’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.” And then Alonso reached for him, and he lost himself again.

It would have been easy to love Alonso, sweet and forgiving - like Rose had been for the Doctor - at least for a while. But it wasn’t safe. Jack didn’t think he could bear it - not after Ianto - if he let himself fall, because Alonso wouldn’t be there forever. So after their second interlude of loving, while Alonso slept, Jack got up quietly and left.

 _Alonso_ , the note had read,  
 _Thank you. You helped more than you can ever know.  
_ _Jack_

He felt more guilt, and anger at himself and pain, after that night. Still improving bit by bit, but waves of grief and guilt kept swamping him, adding to the depression, even after the sweet and forgiving Alonso.

Even now, eons later, he hoped Alonso had understood that he... well. Never mind that. It had been so long ago...

~~~~~~

But now. Now the Face was tired. No longer angry, or guilt-ridden, or grief-stricken. No longer despairing. No longer loathing himself.

Just tired.

“I'm here,” said a familiar voice, piercing the fog of his dreaming. “I look a bit different, but it's me. It's the Doctor.”

 _The Doctor,_ thought the Face dimly, and he heard that voice and Novice Hame’s talking about the legends. The legends of the Face of Boe and his secrets.

And then there was more dreaming, his mind wandering again as he tried to remember. There was something he had to do...

“You were supposed to be dying,” the voice said, and the Face made an effort to rouse himself.

 _Oh yes,_ he thought _. The Doctor. The one who..._ “I have better things to do today. Dying can wait.” _What is another thirty years of dying?_ he thought. _The blink of an eye. It is not yet time for the words. Not until..._

 **“** Oh, I hate telepathy,” said Rose, interrupting the thought. But not Rose, somehow. “Just what I need. A headful of big Face.” The Doctor shushed her and it brought a flash of memory, there and gone too quickly to catch it.

“I had grown tired of the Universe, Doctor. But you have taught me to look at it anew.” He remembered, vaguely, when he could trade witty barbs with the Doctor as fast as... as... in any case, _this_ Doctor, he made the Face remember...

“There are legends, you know,” said the Doctor, smiling fondly at him. The Face basked in that warm regard. “Saying that you're millions of years old.”

For one brief moment, the Face remembered laughing out loud. _Oh_ , he thought, _if you only knew how many years_. But all he said was, “Now that would be impossible.” He was waking up now. It was nice to know that speaking with the Doctor would bring him out of that endless mist of sleepy torpor.

“Wouldn't it just. I got the impression there was something you wanted to tell me.” The Time Lord looked intrigued, and affectionate, and the Face remembered that look from when he had been Jack Harkness. From the Year That Never Was.

He was mildly surprised to find that he had missed that look. “A great secret,” he said.

“So the legend says.”

“It can wait.”

“Oh! Does it have to?” _Silly Time Lord. So impatient. Like someone else I used to know._

_Be._

“We shall meet again, Doctor,” he said, “For the third time - for the last time - and the truth shall be told. Until that day.” _Because it is not yet time..._

“That is enigmatic,” said the Doctor. “That is textbook enigmatic.”

And then he went away, and the Face of Boe drifted again.

\--/-- 

The Face of Boe roused. He could feel the TARDIS.

“He has arrived,” he said, and Hame looked up, startled. He hoped she would not be too sad when he died. He liked Hame.

“What should I do?”

“Find him, before it’s too late,” he said, and she left.

The Face hadn’t thought this quickly in years, maybe centuries. He was very tired. He had kept the city going after the... Bliss, yes, Bliss virus. And he was very...

...very tired.

He roused himself again, to talk with the Doctor. Saw that sadness in the Time Lord’s eyes, tried to remember... oh. Rose. And at this point, the Doctor hadn’t known she would come back, he thought she was lost to him. The Face listened patiently as the Doctor spoke to him and Novice Hame. He urged the Doctor to save the people beneath the city, and some far-off part of him remembered saving other cities, other worlds. As... penance.

The Face was so tired.

But now the Doctor was here, and soon he could rest. Rest at last, forever.

Then there was Martha. So young, this lovely Martha, so innocent still. That faraway part of the Face had loved Martha, trusted her, long ago, and he wanted to tell her. But he was too tired to work through the words, to find a way to tell her without disturbing the timeline, and so he let it be. And he had a last chance to... to... “It is good to breathe the air once more,” he said.

There was something else he was meant to say, that everything had its time, that he was the last of his kind, like the Doctor? No.

Yes. But no.

Something else.

And then he remembered, as he had so long ago, billions of years ago, to preserve the timeline.

 

_You._

 

_Are._

 

_Not._

 

_Alone._

**Author's Note:**

> M for language and implied sex and implied torture


End file.
